The Curious Case of the disappearing Ethernet

[Yossarian]

This is very peculiar...

 

My system runs a Bad Axe 2 motherboard with on-board LAN. Everything regarding the built-in ethernet worked fine for years. Every version of OS X recognized my ethernet hardware. When I booted into verbose mode, I could see the Intel drivers loading.

 

Until recently...

 

I started trying to install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive to test it out before making the big jump with the main drive of my system. While I wasn't successful at first, second, and third attempts (I finally got the install to work), these initial attempts did something to my ethernet settings when attempting to boot into the install disk. This manifested itself when I booted back into my 10.5.8 install. From there, going into the Network Settings, the Built-In Ethernet showed "cable unplugged" even though it was plugged in.

 

The only solution was to go into the motherboards BIOS, disable onboard LAN, boot into 10.5.8, reboot into BIOS, re-enable the onboard LAN, then go back into the Network Settings of the 10.5.8 install.

 

Well, this worked the first few times. As I kept trying to install Snow Leopard it kept messing with my onboard Ethernet. Now nothing works. I cannot get Leopard or Snow Leopard to recognize my Ethernet!

 

Funny thing, the onboard LAN works perfectly in Windows XP.

 

I am very frustrated with this and have tried inserting the EFI string for Ethernet / Time Machine Fix and have tried to add my device ID to the IONetworkingFamiliy.kext>AppleIntel8225XEthernet.kext.

 

Any Suggestions?