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?"

Comments

Antisocial...

[fredrikj]

If by 'antisocial' you'd mean hardware that detracts you from a social life, then, yes, I have plenty of antisocial hardware.

The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

The NIC did not eat your boot sector. I'm very familiar with the design that appears on the web page you posted and there's no way that the NIC could have done it. It has NO way of storing executable code onboard unless there's a flash or EPROM chip installed.

I don't know how your boot sector got trashed, but it wasn't the NIC hardware.

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[rf0]

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

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[Robbat2]

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?)

OS Specific Hardware!

[Black Rabbit]

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.

Beware the cheap NIC

[Pathwalker]

Once I picked up a couple of really cheap no-brand 10/100 cards that had the same MAC address.

No way to change it either - I guess someone missed the point that MACs are supposed to be unique.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

"Yes, but there's no centralized MAC address authority"

Of course there is. It's the IEEE. I know because I shelled out 1600 hard earned dollars for 2^24 MAC numbers. Need their URL?

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[identity0]

Okay, I'm not a networking expert but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night(and am taking a class in networking). Here's my somewhat quick explanation:

IP adresses exist so that you can abstract away the hardware on the network. For example, let's say you have a Linux box with IP of 192.168.1.1 and MAC address of XXXX. You can take that box out, and replace it with a Win2k box of IP 192.168.1.1 and MAC address of YYYY. Anything that needed to talk to 192.168.1.1, can still do so without worring about the underlying hardware, or the MAC address having changed. If you rely on the MAC address only, you'd have to change network settings each time you change servers, or even network cards. Using the MAC address would make sense only if there were something that needed to be sent to one NIC, and only that NIC.

Using IP addresses makes networks far easier to organize, too. You can have a network setup where:
Mail server - 192.168.2.1
DNS server - 192.168.2.2
FTP server - 192.168.2.3

...and so on. The addresses are organized, and you don't have to worry about them changing each time there's an upgrade. If you used only hardware addresses:

Mail server - 43HuI87j2H21
DNS server - 5e776uiWE25
FTP server - U089MN5dw2

...and it would change constantly, making networking a huge headache. As an analogy, think about the phone or mail system - you don't have to change your phone # or mailing address each time you change phones or put up a new building on site, as long as no two lines/buildings have the same address. I hope this helps.

es1370

[moncyb]

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?

Evil Memory

[riclewis]

There was a 128MB stick of SDRAM I had once that killed every motherboard I ever put it in. Lost three before I figured it out, and after that I kept it around just to kill old boards.

Anybody want some cheap RAM?

Re:Evil Memory

[SecretAsianMan]

There was a 128MB stick of SDRAM I had once that killed every motherboard I ever put it in. Lost three before I figured it out, and after that I kept it around just to kill old boards.

Hello?! Those don't go in your PCI slots!

Re:Evil Memory

[slaker]

I have a Duron 850 that kills motherboards AND memory. We could start a club!

Re:Evil Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put your Duron 850 on a board with his ram, who would survive! HARDWARE CAGE MATCH LIVE ON PAY PER VIEW!

Re:Evil Memory

[shfted!]

Sell it on Ebay as possessed!

Power supplies

[Jerf]

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.

ARGH!

[MarvinMouse]

I am understand by obscure acronyms!

GRUB, NIC, SIB, USA, NOB, FSCK, .... !

Will someone please think of the children!

Jumping to Conclusions

[penguinboy]

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!-

And you know this how, exactly? Did you try rebooting the machine with the card removed? I had a similar problem with an Intel NIC that wanted to netboot, but fixing the problem was a simple matter of telling the card not to netboot in its BIOS setup. Obviously it wouldn't be impossible for a NIC to rewrite your boot sector (since it's running unrestricted code when the system BIOS initializes it) but it's extremely unlikely.

X-Cable

[jsse]

Once I got severe electric shock when plugging a parallel cable to a pretty old computer. I believe I saw a flash of lighting between the plug and the socket before I was bounced back.

The cable has 'changed' internally but no one could tell until one tries to plug it into a live computer - and gets the same shocking experience I had. I didn't throw it away, but mark it with 'X' instead. It becomes 'X-Cable' as in 'X-Men' - it's now possessing super-power after the disaster.

Spare parallel cable? Sure!

Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense?

[penguinboy]

The NIC can't run anything. There's no flash or EPROM on it. There's no way for it to force the CPU to execute code. I't can't do a damn thing but perform I/O instructions.

Let's read up on PC hardware initialization, shall we?

Adapter cards on the I/O bus can be configured to present an initialization program in ROM memory somewhere in the middle 128K of free addresses. In hex , these addresses are represented as C0000 to DFFFF. Each time the system is initialized, the POST program scans this area for initialization programs and runs any that it finds. This mechanism allows the display adapter to initialize itself properly (no matter which vendor or model of adapter card you own). Code on the SCSI card makes up to two SCSI disks visible and usable to DOS programs. Code on the LAN adapter will boot a diskless workstation from a LAN server.

I guess you aren't entirely wrong: this isn't really 'forcing' the CPU to do anything, since it exists by design.

Yes, I'm quite sure

[87C751]

No PXE server on my network. Just a Netgear RM356 and a SMC Barricade WAP router that the new card was plugged into. And yes, the boot sector was actually changed. I had to reinstall GRUB to get the machine to boot again, and this box has never had NT installed. (it's dual-boot, but Win98 is the other OS)

I still have another NIC, so I could repeat the experiment. I might, too, just to try to dissect the mechanism at work.

TV special

[valkraider]

I can see it now. FOX joins hands with TechTV to start an entirely new line of reality shows:

"WHEN GOOD MEMORY GOES BAD"

"World's scariest hardware installs!"

"Who wants to install a million NICs?"

"American CPU idle"

"Overclocking Island"

"The weakest SCSI device"

and of course, their obligatory sequals, and finally:

"The Torvalds'" ("TOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!")