Network adapter suddenly stopped working under Ubuntu 12.10

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 12.10 and the network adapter suddenly stopped working. Running ifconfig, the eth0 information is not shown anymore as before (only the lo information is shown). Running lspci, the controller is recognized as shown in the following line:

00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82567V-2 Gigabit Network Connection

The network adapter is the one that comes onboard, I have an Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard.

Trying to get Internet from somewhere, I plugged a PCI wireless card in the motherboard and it was recognized by Ubuntu, so I had Internet, but after using it for 10 minutes, the connection went down and now it doesn't recognize any wireless networks (it says wireless: unavailable), so I cannot connect either wired or wireless. I have tried flashing the BIOS to a newer version and a bunch of different solutions I read in forums but still with no luck.

The strange thing is that if I boot with Windows 7 (I have double boot with grub), both cards are correctly recognized and I can have Internet wired and wireless, so a hardware problem is discarded.

Any ideas? This happened out of the blue for me, because I hadn't made any system updates nor installed any new software when the network adapter went down.

Edit: booting with Ubuntu CD doesn't solve the problem either.. I still have the same problem mentioned above

Answer 1

I have found a solution to my own question in a blog. The problem is not intuitive at all. It looks like that the nework adapter’s EEPROM is damaged, creating a checksum error for the NVM (The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid) that breaks the Ubuntu driver loading therefore the eth0 alias is not created and there isn’t a manageable ethernet adapter for the Ubuntu network manger. Windows doesn't perform this check so that's why it works ok there.

Running dmesg | grep e1000 should show a line stating "The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid"

The solution: remove the old driver, install the updated network controller driver, create a MS DOS boot pen drive, reboot, flash the card eeprom, and reboot again.

All these steps are explained in detail in an excellent tutorial by Sorcerer found in http://thesorcerer.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/guide-intel-82573l-gigabit-ethernet-with-ubuntu-11-04-and-fix-pxe-e05/

It appears that many Intel LAN adapters suffer from this same issue: 82563, 82566, 82567, 82571, 82572, 82573, 82574, 82577, 82578, 82579, or 82583 -based.

Cheers!

Answer 2

Another workaround, if the above doesn't work, is to remove the NVM Checksum. The above didn't finally work for me because the EEPROM is damaged and couldn't be reflashed. In the following link you can find how to remove the NVM Checksum (look for rreese6 posts), it worked flawlessly for me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1276211&page=4

Answer 3

On 12.04 what worked for me was:

in /etc/network/interfaces:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

and

rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules