Topic: p3 will not accept 2nd nic

[Jerry]

I have a puzzler here.  The machine I'm installing 2 nics on is a p3 with 256meg ram,  scsi hard disks (2 x ibm 9.1gig)

It has trouble detecting network cards that I know work in another SME server box I own. (3c509, 3c905, kne100tx)

It will often detect the first card, but the routes are incomplete in netstat -r   ....but If I add a second card, none are detected.  (by not detected, I mean in the admin console).

I've tried both cards that work in another box, so I'm wondering now if I have a hardware conflict with something else on the machine.

...I'm thinking of pulling the scsi card and going with a plain-old IDE setup, in case that's causing the problem.

Are there any items that are known to conflict with network cards?  Many thanks for any opinions you can offer.

-Jerry   /  jerrykarn@hotmail.com

[Michael Smith]

You don't say who makes your motherboard ... I'd suspect either a bad BIOS, perhaps fixable by a BIOS upgrade, or that "PnP OS" is turned ON in said BIOS.  You might also try moving the cards around in the PCI slots; some motherboards are finicky that way.   You can usually find a diagnostic suite with NIC drivers ... try booting to a floppy and seeing if the NIC is visible & responding properly to its maker's commands.