Can't Install Thinkpad T400 NIC Driver

We just got a few Thinkpad T400s (Type 7417) at work and need to run 2003 Server on them.

I installed Server 2003 fine, and the wifi and video and audio drivers and what not all installed fine, but I can't get the built-in wired NIC to work for the life of me.

The Lenovo site claims that it's an Intel 82567LM or 82567LF, since that's what shows up in the driver search.

When I run the installer though it says that there are no Intel network devices on the computer. If I try to install it manually via pointing Device Manager to the extracted folder with the drivers it also says there are no drivers for the device.

So I went to Intel's website and downloaded the driver directly from them:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...indows Server* 2003 Standard Edition&lang=eng

Server 2003 is explicitly supported in that driver, yet it acts the exact same way. When I run it it says, "Cannot install drivers. No Intel Adapters are present in this computer."


So by everything I can tell, whatever the NIC is in this thing, it's not made by Intel despite Lenovo's claim on their support/downloads page. That page does have Broadcom drivers too, but it's only listed for the R500, in the T400 it says N/A in that field.

Still, I tried it anyway because I have no clue what else to do, and it, unsurprisingly, also didn't work. I even tried one of those driver-finder programs called RadarSync, which didn't help at all.


Does anyone know with certainty what NIC is actually in this thing, or know of a way to find out? It's critical to get the wired NIC on these things working, I have no idea what to try at this point.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Have you tried running PCWizard ( http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php) to identify what NIC you have?

 

I didn't know about that one, thanks.

PCWizard shows three network cards; one Atheros wifi, the others just say "Intel Corporation" with no other info. I assume one of them is the firewire port and the other the wired ethernet.

If that's the case and it really has an Intel NIC, there's absolutely no reason for it to be rejecting that driver like it is, I really don't get it.

This is Server 2003 R2, that's the ONLY deviation I can think of with the OS driver support listed, but it wouldn't make any sense for the same driver to not work on R2, and even if it did, Intel of all companies should have a driver for it. Plus, all the other drivers I need work just fine.

 

So I got it working finally. FYI to anyone that may have to do the same thing:

For whatever reason the drivers simply don't recognize the NIC to be a compatible Intel device and refuse to install. So instead of updating the drivers by pointing it to the driver folder, I had to select the "Don't search, I will choose the driver to install" option, select network adapter from the list of hardware types, then navigate to the driver folder and pick the 82567 Gigabit from the list, and ignore the Windows message saying that it doesn't recognize the driver to be compatible.

After doing that the NIC appeared in the network connections list and is working just fine.