Lightning fried my shiaattt..lol... no seriously onboard ethernet prob

[frankyrizzello]

Hi,

This is my first post on this forum. we had a lightning storm last week and a big one basically hit my house and my xbox started flashing the red ring of death and my computer went offline.. i turned my xbox off then back on and it went to green again ..so i can still play online with my xbox which means im getting internet to my modem.. i know i am also because i took the ethernet cable out of my pc and into my laptop "which im on now", and it obviously works fine.. my orange light is still lit up on the onboard network card. oh this is a home biuld pentium4 quadcore running windows 7. but it says no networks available, basically telling me my ethernet cable is unplugged and to plug it in. so i went down to ncix and bought a pci ethernet card thinking this would work, but first of all i install it and turn on the comp and it goes to motherboard screen then black with single cursor at top and thats it.. sits there.. usually should say loading operating system.. so i unplug the card and turn it back on and it boots up fine. so i tried stuffing it in there when its running and nothing happens, windows doesnt find new hardware and i cant see it in device manager. could the lightning have fried my board and toasted the pci slot too? this little network card didnt come with drivers either. but i dont think thats the problem.. any ideas out there?? thanks in advance for any help.

 

[frankyrizzello]

whats up.. noone has any ideas???

 

[Celegorm]

It's possible yes.

Something to try if you haven't already is to unplug your computer, put your finger on back of the motherboard's network jack (the solid metal side) and hold the power button for 30 seconds. I've seen multiple cases where this clears a static charge that lets everything work again.

 

[root]

Hi,
so i tried stuffing it in there when its running and nothing happens, windows doesnt find new hardware and i cant see it in device manager. could the lightning have fried my board and toasted the pci slot too? this little network card didnt come with drivers either. but i dont think thats the problem.. any ideas out there?? thanks in advance for any help.

Firstly.

that's a really bad idea, (don't try plugging in PCI cards whilst a machine is running!!)

but yes, a lightning strike or power surge can do some weird and wonderful things.
I has a machine that had suffered a power strike, it knocked out the onboard graphics, and LAN, but everything else was fine.

If you think that the PCI bus is broken, try plugging in a different card and seeing if it works.
(and whilst you're next in the shop, may I recommend a surge protector?)

 

[HunterSli]

Are you comfortable in Bios? If so could you please insert the PCI Ethernet Card, go in to Bios and reset all the settings, if you could also tell us the System Male or even better the motherboard make that would be great.

 

[frankyrizzello]

ok.. it was plugged into a surge protector.. it came through the internet cable i think.. and i cant put the card in and get to bios.. soon as the card is installed.. i cant get it to go to any screen..i hit tab or anything else and it just goes straight to black screen with cursor at the top.. i dont know what you mean by system male.. and my mother board is a gigabyte ga-p55-ud3r..im trying the finger on the back of the jack now..

 

[frankyrizzello]

so nothing has worked so far.. next step is taking it down to ncix and getting them to check it out.. i hate having to do that, i built it myself and would like to fix it myself but not looking good so far.. thanks for the help anyway guys