Thursday, June 20, 2013

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.

4 comments:

  1. What about VirtualBox?? I'm having the same issue on a freshly installed Windows7 box, literally no other software on it besides Oracle's VBox. So is it possible to get both of them working at the same time? Do I have to uninstall VirtualBox first and then reinstall the Intel driver and then install VirtualBox again? Your VM's and settings stay the same when you uninstall VirtualBox, right??

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  2. Ok, so I had to uninstall VirtualBox off my Windows 7 host and reboot just to get to the advanced options on my Intel NIC. I was able to finally open the properties window and see all the extra tabs, including the "Advanced" tab which is the one I really needed. I turned on all the Wake-On-LAN options for my network adapter (the reason I needed to get into advanced options in the first place) and rebooted again just to make sure the changes would stick. Re-installed Vbox and lo and behold! Everything still works. I can wake from Lan and have Vbox start and run VM's as a service on boot. It appears that the changes made behind that Advanced tab still stick even when it gets hidden away from whatever weird network driver magic VirtualBox injects into it. Thanks to your post, I never would have even guessed to look at Vbox as the culprit. Bookmarking for future reference. Cheers!

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    Replies
    1. FYI - I've since discovered that as long as you don't install Vbox's Host-Only network device during setup, the problem doesn't occur either.

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    2. Thanks for the tip!! I'll have to test that. Not right now, I'm still developing the VM for possible production use later, and it's kinda useful to have the Host-Only networking control. Once it's ready I'll definitely try it and post back my results!

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