Friday, January 04, 2013

Troubleshooting Network Adapter in a Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Installation


How the problem surfaced:

I had purchased a Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit laptop from Toshiba on which I was planning to do some work. Then Windows 8 Preview became available. This was installed on a second partition of this machine. Sine Home Premium does not support many of the things I wanted, I decided to buy and install Window 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I bought the Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit from evalueSoftware.com. I installed it on the Windows 7 Home Premium partition. The installation went well except for a very serious problem. I could connect neither to the internet nor to the other computers in my network (there other windows 7 computers connected to the home group). Naturally I tried to see if my network card was OK. I got a positive response to my ping and also the second partition had no network-related problems. Digging deeper I found the Network Adapter node in Device Manager was marked as ‘Other Device’ and the details from system information is as shown:

Besides the network related drives quite a few others were also not present. A high volume storage device connected during the installation to a USB drive got corrupted and the message thrown was ‘format this drive’.

I used my Repair Disc for the Home Premium to get back into the original OS and looked at the needed files for the adapters. The next section shows what they were. Although I could determine the needed files for Wi-Fi and PCI Controller I was not sure of what the other items in the previous picture of component errors including the ‘Base System Devices’

Toshiba Satellite P775-S7370 Laptop

Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit       HodentekWin7







Second mini-port is same as first one




Reinstalling Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Since I could get to these files from my other partition, I decided to try and reinstall Windows 7 Ultimate x64 using the driver files available through my other partition. When I tried to do so, I got the Windows message that the files are not digitally signed.

I quote from the General tab of the properties of the driver,

“Windows cannot verify the digital signature for the drivers required for this device. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source. (Code 52)”


Hunt for the digitally signed drivers

I had to do an extensive search for this elusive element. The network related driver names are right. Attempt to point to the driver on the computer brings up the above error messages and sometimes comes up with the statement that the drivers are up to date.

Trying to get the Intel® WiFi Link 1000 BGN driver from the Intel site landed me on this page shown here:


Well this could not come up well on my IE9.0 (done with errors) and so I needed to install Mozilla. This was still not enough since you need an agent from a third party shown in this next image.


Which of course needed the latest Java and I had to get more of my caffeine shots.

With all this the automatic discovery of drivers was not completed after running the program for couple of hours! I thrashed the program and sent an angry note to Intel regarding my views of this tool.

During this hunt I searched everywhere and there were quite a few programs I downloaded which were supposed to do the discovery and automatic update part. The problem was, there was no network connection. Most of them needed registering which means $$ and some of them downloaded at a minimum 7_zip, Real Player, Google Chrome besides wanting to clean of my registry etc. Fortunately the network was not working and I did not want to use them.

 Going to Toshiba site looking for Network adapter drivers was easy since I knew the exact model of my laptop. However the filtered information gave me only for Windows 8 where as I was looking for Windows 7.

Fix for the Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller

The following site provided the driver to update the driver on the computer:


After the update the Device Manager displayed the controller as shown:


The details of the updated driver are as shown:




Compare the existing and updated versions.

Fix for the other devices marked Basic etc.

I tried to download the following:

Intel WiFi Link 1000 BGN Driver 13.1.1.1 for Windows 7

From the Softpedia site here:


But the setup.exe file did not find the driver for the WiFi on my computer but it did upgrade couple of the drivers marked ‘Basic System Device’ all related to the System Devices node in the Device Manager.

Here are some screen shots of what they were:




It is possible that these were removed and devices with the same functionality were added during an upgrade from another site (see last section).

Upgrading the Intel® WiFi Link 1000 BGN

The driver needed to upgrade was finally found here:


The sp54841.exe file when executed created files in the System32 folder which were used during the upgrade operation. It can be in either of the folders; Drivers or DriverStore.

Here are some property pages captured after the upgrade:





Fix for Universal Serial Bus Controller
With the above upgrades there was the USB Controller still needed repair:



A fix for the above was found here:


The file 8ay210ww.exe (67.5 MB) was downloaded and installed. I am guessing that it negated an earlier install and brought in files that would make the controller install without errors. The files related to ‘Renesas’ were installed during this installation.

The Installation of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit was finally completed. However it was found that during the process the computer refused to recognize my Windows 8 Preview in the second partition. The boot menu did not show an option to boot to the second partition. Then I installed the free program EasyBCD2.2 (http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/) which enabled me to see the second partition during the boot. 

However it turned out that some changes might have influenced the second partition that corrupted the files (?? Need explanation here). Fortunately I had the original Windows 8 Preview and I installed the same in the second partition.

This finally brought me back to the position I wanted to be in:

1st Partition: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
2nd Partition: Windows 8 Preview

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2 comments:

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IFA said...

This is what i am looking thanks for sharing .

redes wifi

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