Antisocial Hardware?

Posted by Cliff on Monday March 17, 2003 @11:45AM from the it-really-shouldn't-do-that dept.

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?"

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No Surprise by 4of12 · 2003-03-17 11:53 · Score: 1, Offtopic

With the way that the functionality of hardware and software is being exchanged, I'm not surprised to see this.

On the one hand you have Winmodems using cheapo crippled hardware with software performing functions that used to be in hardware.

On the other hand, you have modern network cards ready to offload TCP/IP processing from the OS and to do DMA.

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