Unable to find ethernet adapter

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

I am trying to diagnose an old pc, Inspiron 560, and i cannot for the life of me figure out whats wrong with the ethernet connection. Motherboard is Ig43t-dm1. A service manual says it has a RTL8102el/RTL8103el. Idk if that helps. I cant even find the adapter listed using most commands, but i do remember it working at some point in the past (the pc has been in storage for a few months.) The adapter may just be bad, can anyone help me diagnose this? I am currently using a live usb with Archcraft on it, but arch is arch. I can switch back to EOS if need be. If its busted, ill just toss it. :slight_smile:

edit: Ive already ruled out it being disabled in the BIOS, even tried doing the classic ā€œenable/disable, reboot, enable/disable, then load defaultsā€ trick.

2

If you do not find in ā€˜dmesgā€™ any note for RTLxxx then I think it is dead.
Maybe a last test with an other sys (deb, win) to cross-checkā€¦

Edit: tried lspci?

3

Have you tried installing the r8168-dkms module and rebooting. See if it works on that one instead of the r8169 kernel module.

yay -S r8168-dkms

Reboot

Edit: If it doesnā€™t work then you can uninstall the package after.

4

Sorry, IRL stuff came up.

I guess i could slap a HDD to it and install the r8168-dkms module so that its capable of rebooting, but is there an easier way just using the live usb?

i will check

5

dmesg bring up nothing regarding RTL or rtl

lspci shows:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 1
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 3
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 90)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SATA AHCI Controller
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller

I added a usb to ethernet adapter to get online. but idk what im looking for here

6

Just checked some Realtek-docs, it should be PCI-express. If your lspci does not trow any word for Realtek, I think itā€™s dead or disabled orā€¦

Do you see anything in your BIOS regarding this chip & its behavior? Can you switch on/off any other function regarding this chip?

Can you awake it using another system? (Win, Debian, Ubuntu etc.?)

7

Yes in the bios there is an option to boot from PXE OPTION ROM, and you can see it pop up in the POST screen. I have enabled/disabled both the wake from lan and option rom and did a reboot a few times in case it had saved a incorrect setting. Theyre all currently enabled. I tried booting into a few linux distros, none seem to notice the onbaord ethernet. Nor does a WinPE iso i have to do hard drive partition adjustments

8

Then I am out of ideasā€¦
Did you try ricklinuxā€™ suggestion? - My last resort.
But I think, something is dead if Win also cannot activate your chip. Sorryā€¦

9

I will have to scavenge a HDD. Will check back in the future. Thanks for the help!

10

One last idea: did you cut your BIOS-battery for some minutes (or press some cold reset of your BIOS if available)?

11

ā€¦ i do remember clearing the CMOS when i first got it because it woudnt POST, and if i recall correctly, I had to steal a jumper from another pc to jump the pins. Maybe I left the jumper on? Surely not as it remembers the settings, but I think i moved it from the 1-2 clear pins to the 2-3 pins, when it didnt even have a jumper at all prior. I will have to check thanks for bringing that up.

Edit:Nope, that area is all good.

12

One more point: your battery is still good?
3V or whatever needed?
You told about ā€˜old pcā€™?

13

Yes i just replaced the battery with a new one. My hopes were to use this pc as a low end server as it has a gigabit ethernet port lmao, but its a no go unless i find a workaround or fix it

14

Some weeks ago I bought a USB-GBit-Adapter tp-link UE300.
Works well here in Debian & EOS, but no guaranteeā€¦

15

I would, but it doesnt have usb 3.0 ports to achieve the full gigabit speed. Best i could get is ~480mbps out of 2.0

16

Do you have an option for a wlan-unit?
Or use 2 of the USB2 with link-aggregation?
Better than nothingā€¦

17

Please post the output of inxi -Fz

1 Like
18

Have you even installed eos to see if the ethernet is there. It should be using the r8169 module.
Try sudo modprobe r8169

19 
[liveuser@eos-2025.03.19 ~]$ inxi -Fz
System:
  Kernel: 6.13.7-arch1-1 arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.3.3 Distro: EndeavourOS
Machine:
  Type: Desktop System: Dell product: Inspiron 560 v: 00
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Dell model: 0K83V0 v: A00 serial: <superuser required> BIOS: Dell
    v: A02 date: 02/26/2010
CPU:
  Info: dual core model: Pentium E5500 bits: 64 type: MCP cache: L2: 2 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1203 min/max: 1203/2803 cores: 1: 1203 2: 1203
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel 4 Series Integrated Graphics driver: i915 v: kernel
  Display: unspecified server: X.Org v: 21.1.16 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.6
    driver: X: loaded: modesetting dri: crocus gpu: i915
    resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: crocus,swrast
    platforms: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device
  API: OpenGL v: 4.5 compat-v: 2.1 vendor: intel mesa v: 25.0.1-arch1.2
    renderer: Mesa Intel G45/G43 (ELK)
  API: Vulkan Message: No Vulkan data available.
  Info: Tools: api: clinfo, eglinfo, glxinfo, vulkaninfo
    de: kscreen-console,kscreen-doctor gpu: nvidia-smi wl: wayland-info
    x11: xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel 82801JI HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  API: ALSA v: k6.13.7-arch1-1 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.4.1 status: active
Network:
  Message: No PCI device data found.
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8152 Fast Ethernet Adapter driver: r8152 type: USB
  IF: enp0s26f7u4 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 116.21 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda model: USB Disk 3.0 size: 116.21 GiB type: USB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 10 GiB used: 104.1 MiB (1.0%) fs: overlay source: ERR-102
Swap:
  Alert: No swap data was found.
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 29.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): cpu: 497 mobo: 844
Info:
  Memory: total: 12 GiB note: est. available: 9.67 GiB used: 1.45 GiB (15.0%)
  Processes: 158 Uptime: 4h 3m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.37
20

I have yet to salvage a HDD not in use, it might be worth my time to throw this pc in the garbage as it was only going to be a gigabit reverse proxy server. If come across one soon Iā€™ll consider a test that requires a reboot

modprobe yields no results sadly