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Antisocial Hardware?
87C751 asks: "Over the weekend, I happened upon a deal: 10/100 PCI NICs for $1.99. I bought two and installed one in my Linux box. The box came up to POST, and the new NIC started looking for a DHCP server (which I thought was cute, if useless). Once that timed out, boot sequence continued to the message "NTLDR not found"! In an attempt to do a PXE net boot, the new NIC had -rewritten my boot sector!- Granted, a few minutes with a GRUB boot floppy set things right again, but why in the world is J. Random piece of hardware arrogant enough to frob my disc? Has anyone else been bitten by antisocial hardware?"
Ever run into a piece of hardware that was OS specific? The most notorious of these, for me, has been the Winmodem, but I have heard that there are Windoze specific printers and other stuff as well. I was bitten once, and ever since then, if they can't tell me if it works on a Mac as well as Windoze, if not specifically Linux, I won't touch the thing!
Second to this, for me, is hardware that is marketed by the chipset, as, for me, these have been typically difficult to find drivers for. Related to this would be motherboards with onboard everything, all with untraceable drivers for their generic chipsets.
It wouldn't be so bad if, when whichever OS can't detect what it is, it installs a half decent generic driver that works reasonably well until the proper stuff can be found. Pet peeves here are generic video drivers that only give you 800*600...or worse, 640*480...in only 16 colours, modems and sound cards that can't be configured, and network interfaces that can't connect.
Could it be that it did actually find a Windows server and tried to boot off that? Its the only thing I can think of as to actually build the MBR to know about NTDLR from a NIC. Nah can't see it happening
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
To add to this, the card in question uses the Realtek 8139 chipset (looking at the picture anyway), which is the '8139too' driver in the linux kernel.
AFAIK those cards do NOT come with a EPROM slot at all, and the realtek drivers with the cards are first rate.
The only way anything even remotely like what you describe could have happened would be if your winblows OS was subject to something else nasty.
It's windows, I wouldn't put it above doing this being the way that it is (but maybe we should ask those two russians that hacked microsoft before and may have looked at the source?)
ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
I bought an es1370 PCI sound card for $20 to replace my ISA one. Works great in Linux, but the Windows drivers cleared the boot sector and erased my BIOS. Is this a new trend for hardware? ;-)
This sucks because my VIA based motherboard has a bug which causes lockups during heavy DMA activity when a ISA sound card is installed. If you have the Linux kernel source, look in Documentation/ sound/ VIA-chipset for more info about this problem.
Took me a while to figure it out. At first I thought it was a problem with a new hard drive--stress testing it would lock up the machine. Once I figured it out, it was obvious. I tested the situtation thoroughly. With ISA sound, lockups, without, no lockups. Who would've thought a sound card can cause problems with your hard drive?
Few people seem to realize it, but if you have a computer that seems cursed, suspect the power supply.
My (now) wife's computer was toasting everything over a period of years. It didn't stop until I replaced the case, and thus the power supply in passing.
Nobody ever seems to suspect the power supply if the computer is running, but I suspect that ill-formed power can toast modern electronics.