Wired connection not working after computer crash.

Hey guys.

So my computer froze while in Windows, and the music I was playing became stuck as well (the usual PRRRRRR sound). I had to manually reboot it. Even lost many hours worth of youtube upload.

Anyways, after that, the wired connection hasn't been working ever since.

Now, I do know that I always had a dodgy network cable and a somewhat unstable connection overall, BUT if I connect the network cable to the little wireless transmitter, I can connect to the Wi-Fi just fine (that's how I am connected now). But if I plug the same network cable back in my computer, the cable is recognised but the network is not found.

What can I do?

This is just problem #685498576 on top of all the other computer problems that I have currently, seems like this new laptop I bought hasn't been able to work properly for longer than 5 minutes so far.

EDIT: This is what I see if I use the troubleshoot, don't know what that means:

 

Have you tried power cycling your router, also try reinstalling the network drivers.

 

Last night (like, 4 hours ago), I resetted / turned off and on again the routers at the last floor in my building (that's where they are), and after that, even wifi hasn't worked anymore. Writing from my phone is tedius because the browser always crashes before I can complete a post.
The troubleshooting for the wifi says: "the DNS server isn't responding". I'm hoping the whole building is without internet so that somebody will do something about it

 

Yep, whole building without internet now... All I did was to flick a switch off and on a again on one router, and hold a reset button for 10 seconds on another. I did made sure that all cables were firmly connected. The whole internet shouldn't have gone down like this, right?

I took photos with my phone of the whole routers setup, but if I try to upload them, the browser in my phone crashes...

 

By holding the reset buton on a router for 10 seconds you did revert it to factory settings rather than just reboot it, so it will have to be configured once again.

 

Oh crap. So that explains it why even the wifi is gone..
Anything I can do on my side to fix it back?

 

If you don't know the router setup before you reverted it to factory settings, better not touch it.

 

Would pics showing model numbers and the whole setup help?

 

If you do have the setup of a router saved into a file or have all the settings written down than you may as well try to set it up back the way it was. But that is if you know what you are doing - otherwise someone may be really pissed (if they aren't already)

 

Ahem, okay, I'll wait for the landlords to take care of it. I'll come back to let you guys know if my original problem with the wired connection is still there once the router has been fixed. My bad on this one :$

 

Riiiiight, so the wireless connection has been fixed, and I can finally connect from my laptop again. So, back to my original problem (please check the first post of this thread). Wired connection hasn't worked ever since I had a system crash in which I was forced to reboot manually.

I reinstalled my lan driver (the Realthk Ethernet Driver, I did a "repair" installation), as suggested by @tijo , but problem still there.
(About power cycling the router.. is that turning it off and on again? - Either way the routers have been reconfigured today after having been accidentally reset to factory settings)

I get this ""Local Area Connection 134" doesn't have a valid IP configuration" error if I try to troubleshoot the problem.

What can I do about it?

 

Yes, power cycling is turning it off and on again.

You could always try a full uninstall of the ethernet adapter, first through the Realtek uninstaller and then through the device manager, give it a reboot and see if that fixes it. Otherwise, it's always possible that something is wrong with the network config in Windows, but that's not something I ever had to fix, the only time I had Windows give me a network error that looked tob e OS related, the computer was due for a clean install anyways, so that's what I did rather than try to troubleshoot the problem.

 

Right, so I uninstalled the Ethernet adapter, now in Device Manager, which one is the one I should uninstall? I thought I'd be able to identify it but it doesn't seem so obvious.
I see a lot of this stuff, and some of them have the "!" mark to them (those in the photo, and TAP-Windows Adapter V9 #103 to #106), no idea what they are or if there is something wrong with them:

 

Those TAP-Win32 adapters are virtual adapters, likely setup by a VPN program or some such.

There should be an ethernet adapter somewhere in the list, if it's not there, I'd say you can go ahead and resintall. If you are using any kind of VPN software, I'd also try to reinstall that and maybe delete those adapters as well.

A computer with no virtual adapters usually looks like this:

 

Oh man, this is getting worse... now even the cable itself is not being regonised when inserted...

So this is what I did from before to now:

1) uninstalled the Realthk Ethernet
2) while waiting for your reply to see if I was supposed to do anything about that stuff in Device Manager, I followed the steps of this video:

3) so I followed the steps and did this:

(while also finding ALL THOSE other "Local Area Connections", why do I have so many??)
4) Before checking if it worked, I rebooted the computer since the driver was still uninstalled
5) installed the driver, plugged the cable, now even the cable itself is not being recognised as being plugged...
6) checked Device Manager, I can see the Ethernet Controller is there now (before it must not have been there because I had already uninstalled the driver), but it has the "!" icon...

7) uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled the drivers again, checked cable connection again, cable still not recognised, and Ethernet Controller in Device Manager still showing the "!" and the same status as shown in the photo...

About the VPN, I don't use it, I wonder why I have so many entries about it.. can using Firefox in "Private" mode cause such entires to be created (I don't know, maybe it goes in some sort of VPN mode by itself?)? Or sometimes Kaspersky opens my browser in "safe mode" when I go on banking sites.. maybe that has anything to do with that? No idea..

 

You have a ton of LAN connections probably because you have a ton of virtual adapter. Honestly, at this point, it looks like something really screwed with your network settings.

 

Something screwed with my network settings?? Oh that sounds scary.. something.. or someone? Do I need to get worried? I mean, are we talking about something like some sort of outside hack?

About the problem:
I reverted the changes I did after watching the youtube video, so now it's in its original state. Then I uninstalled the Ethernet Controller from Device Manager, rebooted, installed the driver again, tested, still no cable recognition and still "!" sign in Device Manager for the Ethernet Controller... FML.

 

The problem is likely a configuration issue rather than a hack in my opinion. Still, the first thing I'd look for is the cause of all those virtual network adapters. The TAP-Windows Adapters aren't hardware and something created them.

VPN utilities, Hamachi, Avast VPN, Comodo programs are likely culprits. There are plenty of legitimate programs that can play with your network settings and I'd rule that out before freaking out about potential intrusions.

All those LAN connections are the results of those TAP-Windows virtual network adapters and it looks like you're attempting to connect to the LAN through one of those.

Also, set your connection back to obtain an IP automatically.

 

@tijo , thanks for still being here, I thought you gave up and left and I was on my own.

About those programs, "VPN utilities, Hamachi, Avast VPN, Comodo programs", I haven't used any of those. The only things that I can thin kof that could be remotely close to what a VPN does (which is just a proxy server, right? I don't know much about the topic) is when Kaspersky puts me in a "safe browser" for internet banking or when I use the private mode on Firefox. Other than these two things, I have no idea what else it could be.

Should I delete/disable all of those?

I saw some properties of some of them and I saw mentions of this "the open vpn project", googled it and found this site https://openvpn.net/ but I had never used that website before. I'm really confused.

Anyway, besides this worrying thing about these virtual networks, the problem with the Ethernet Controller still persists... despite in how many different ways I uninstall it and reinstall it, it's still giving me error Code 18 in Device Manager (simply says that it has to be reinstalled, but already tried that). And until that works, I can't even get the cable to be recognised anymore... I'm googling all I can to try to fix it.. seems like all I do these days is try to solve internet problems

Thanks a lot for your help by the way, this forum is really god-sent.

 

Have a look at this.. I already have one more virtual network since I took the first screenshot earlier, it went from 206 to 207.. But I'm thinking, maybe every time I reconnect the network cable, it's creating one more of these? I'll test now and check.

About this "the open vpn project", this is where I found that information about it:



UPDATE 1: I reconnected the network cable to the laptop to see if that's what was causing new virtual network to appear on the list.. it didn't.. in fact after rebooting the network went back to 206 again, and Local Area Connection 218 has disappeared.
It's 2:30 AM here in Hong Kong. I'm going to leave this for now, and get some sleep. Hopefully by tomorrow when I check this again some more people who understand more than me (like @downloads ) have jumped on this thread again and can hopefully guide me through getting things back to normal..
Thanks for the support @tijo , feel free to let me know if you think there's something I should do. (which reminds me, for safety, should I delete/disable all those virtual networks?)

UPDATE 2:
The Ethernet Controller is no longer showing the "!" in Device Manager, it shows now this instead.
Also Device Manager doesn't stop refreshing itself... the list of devices goes white for a second and then it reappears. No idea what's going on.

 

It should be pretty safe to delete all those networks.

It's possible to point Windows to the driver, if you have then required inf files and such rather than using the install. There are tutorials on how to install a driver from the task manager out there, so you could try that.

Honestly, as not fond of the machine gun approach as I am, I'll still suggest it if troubleshooting the issue becomes troublesome and too time consuming. Backup everything and reinstall Windows. At some point it may be faster than pinpointing the source of the issue.

 

Ah, it's finally working now!
I uninstalled all those 200+ entries from Device Manager, uninstalled everything minus the wireless driver, rebooted, plugged in, and the cable was finally recognised again and the connection worked!


Took me like 30 minutes to manually delete all those entries.. I am sure more will be created later on so I will closely keep an eye on them and see if there's any new one.

I still have no idea what's causing those virtual networks to be created, I don't know what they do and I am quite paranoid on it being some sort of external attack...

Thanks @tijo for the help last night, this discovery of these virtual networks in the end was connected to the problem, and getting rid of them solved it.
+2 reputation to you and @downloads for helping me out in this thread!

Now I can go back to focusing on the OTHER computer problems that I still have, -_-'

 

If you still have "OTHER computer problems" , seem like you need a windows reset/refresh