No ProSet tabs after installing Intel drivers for PRO1000/PT Server Adapter

I rebuilt my Windows 7 Professional box this week.  It was time, and installing with SP1 slipstreamed allowed me not to have to load a third party AHCI driver for my 6Gb/s SATA controller.  Everything was fine until I realised my network speed was a little slow.  I hadn't installed Intel's driver and ProSet yet, so I downloaded the most recent.  After installation, the Advanced tab was gone, but no ProSet tabs.  Uninstall the driver, the card would get re detected, Advanced tab would return.  Reinstall Intel driver, Advanced tab gone, no ProSet tabs.  Updated to latest driver from Windows Update.  Same thing.  This went on for a couple of days with slight variations.  Here's what I did to ultimately get the Intel drivers and ProSet installed and working:

1. Uninstall the nic via Device Manager.  Check the "Delete driver" box.
2. Follow this to disable automatic driver installation. (That procedure only works on Win 7 Pro+)
3. Either re-scan for devices in Device Manager, or reboot your system. (I chose to reboot)
4. Once restarted, verify that the nic shows up under "Unknown Devices" as an "Ethernet Controler".
5. Revert the change you made in gpedit so you can install the correct driver now.
6. Install the appropriate version of Intel's drivers/utilities for your card.

You should now have all of the tabs for VLANs, Teaming, Link Speed, and Advanced.

Hope I save someone out there some time.

** ADDENDUM **

I upgraded the Intel drivers recently, and after that I was back to my original issue.  Turns out I also needed to uninstall VirtualBox to get things back to working.  

** ADDENDUM ** ADDENDUM **

Actually, if you do not install Host-Only networking in Virtualbox, the problem doesn't appear.

M.

DKMS for updated e1000e driver

So, since I updated the e1000e driver, I've gotten no more errors in my messages logs.  However, it does seem that every month or two, a kernel update gets pushed to Squeeze, which un-does my driver fix.  When I worked at Dell, and we needed driver to be recompiled for any kernel that got installed, DKMS was the solution.  I rarely have to use cutting edge hardware with, umm, mature operating systems these days (I use old hardware with old operating systems), I hadn't given it much thought.  While DKMS is awesome when someone else does all the upfront work for you, trying to sort it out on one's own is significantly less fun.  I spent several hours over the course of a couple of weeks reading various things, and all of them failing to do what I wanted.  Got back to this week and finally got it sorted out.

1. Dowload appropriate source for the e1000e driver: http://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/files/e1000e%20stable/2.3.2/e1000e-2.3.2.tar.gz
2. Extract archive to /usr/src.
3. Create a dkms.conf in the /usr/src/e1000e-2.3.2 directory with the following contents:
   PACKAGE_NAME="e1000e"
   PACKAGE_VERSION="2.3.2"
   BUILT_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="src"
   BUILT_MODULE_NAME[0]="e1000e"
   DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/"
   AUTOINSTALL="yes"
   MAKE[0]="BUILD_KERNEL=${kernelver} make -C src CFLAGS_EXTRA=-DDISABLE_PM"
   CLEAN[0]="make -C src clean"
   REMAKE_INITRD=yes
4. Now just add the module via dkms:
   dkms -m e1000e -v 2.3.2 add
   dkms -m e1000e -v 2.3.2 build
   dkms -m e1000e -v 2.3.2 install
   
   After completion, you should restart the system to verify that the initial ramdisk got rebuilt correctly, and that the correct version of the driver is being used (modinfo e1000e).

Updating e1000e driver in Debian Squeeze

I kept having issues with my onboard Intel NIC on my Debian Squeeze NAS, the all too common:

Detected Hardware Unit Hang:

The version of the driver is significatly old, so I downloaded the newest from Sourceforge and tried to compile it. It failed to compile do to some power management code that is not in the kernel source from Debian.  Eventually I found someone else who'd had the same problem with the igb driver and solved it just by adding a flag to make:  CFLAGS_EXTRA=-DDISABLE_PM

Did the same when building the e1000e driver, compiled smoothly, remade initramfs, rebooted, haven't seen an error since.