Ok, I am having serious trouble with this, so please help me out. bear with my long story, please.
One of our computers here at work started doing something funny...it wouldn't start windows. Whenever it was about 70% done loading windows (the version was 2000 NT) it would go to a big blue screen with many serial numbers and weird numbers and stuff, the only ything I could really read was something saying that it couldnt access a file called "ntoskrnel(or kernl or something).exe" this is undoubtedly a system file and for some reason, windows couldnt use it, I automatically assumed a virus.
Wanting to purge the computer of this virus that wouldnt even let it start up, I decided it was time to reinstall windows. we could not find windows NT 2000, so we decided to go with windows 98, which was all that we could find. I reinstalled it, formatting the hard drive in the process.
Windows was up and running and all was good..for a bit. I ran the internet connection wizard to tell my computer that I was on a LAN and such. I tried to open internet explorer, but it said it could not find the webpage because I was not connected. It obviously didnt know I was on a LAN, or couldnt access the LAN because it wiuld not go on the internet. I ran the internet connection wizard again, still no progress.
since that didnt work, I figured if I could connect the computer to the company's network, that it would know that there was a LAN. I went to the networking thing in the control panel and did something with properties and told it to enable some type of networking feature. It then installed some stuff and restarted my computer. When I came back, my network places was on the desktop and the "entire network" option was there. I know I set it to the right network in the contol panel but when I clicked on "entire network" it said "cannot access the network bla bla bla".
OK, heres when I really begin to believe that the computer has no idea it is connected to a LAN because it cannot access the internet or the network (the network being what we need the most right now). Now, I dont know too much about networking, as I dont do it too much, but I seem to be the guy who knows the most about computers around here, so we're pretty screwed.
I decided to check the hardware to make sure that it could even tell that it had some sort of thing for a LAN or something, I was just looking for anything suspicious. I found that my computer had two unknown things on it, one of which being a PCI Ethernet Controller......hmmmm that sounds like somethin g that would be very relevant to my computer not being able to connect to the LAN, so I ran the add new hardware wizard and it told me that this PCI Ethernet Adapter thing had NO DRIVERS!!!! no wonder it wasnt working!!! I dont have any drivers for this thing!
I looked on the internet (on another computer), but to no avail. I canot find the right drivers for this thing. I need to ask, is this thing even the problem? Am I doing something wrong to try to connect to the network? If this is the problem, where can I get the drivers?
I think that when I formatted the drive by reinstalling windows, I deleted these drivers, and snce i intalled an older version of windows, it did not come with the drivers for this. please help us out here!!!
Thank you!!