Lightning sucks!!!!!!!!

[exar]

Well, after not having internet access since a thunderstorm Monday night, I finally called Cox to find out if there were still service outages. There wasn't, and they could see my cable modem on the network. So I assume that my ethernet card is dead. However, I cannot tell that there is anything actually wrong with it (other than not being seen by the cable modem). The system control panel shows everything is working fine. Thank god I saved the USB cable, otherwise I'd still be offline.

Is there any other way to test the ethernet card without having a network connection? I was going to call MSI to get a new board, but I figure that I should have some sort of proof to show that it is dead. It's just strange that the ethernet would be the only thing to die out of the whole motherboard...

Config:
MSI K7N420 Pro
AthlonXP 1900+
512MB Crucial DDR
eVGA GeForce 4 440MX
WinXP Home

[Matthyahuw]

ping your loopback address, you can type:
ping loopback
or
ping 127.0.0.1
or
you can try to ping other IP addys, local or not....

[majortom1981]

i had a lightning storm here last night and our house got hit. my router got fried. but anyway check ur network cable. the net cable going from the comp in my room to the router got hit and it blew the cable.

[exar]

Well, I've tried the pings, and they all seem to work fine. I've tried another cable, and that didn't help. I'm now thinking that it must be in the cable modem. I don't see how the ethernet portion of the nForce could die without me experiencing other problems. The cable modem works with the USB connection, so I'm just going to use that for now. I'm not getting any slower speeds now than before, so there's really no point in me worrying about getting the ethernet to work again.

I'm not sure how easy MSI is to work over on tech support (like Gateway is, hehe), or I might try to get a replacement before the warranty is up, just in case there is a problem that I can't find...