Today I found myself in a strange situation where my Windows Server 2008r2 machine has internet connection while not showing any connections in 'network connections'. It does not show anywhere in Network and Sharing Center. The strange thing is that when I do ipconfig /all I can see the 'Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection', I can see the 'Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller' in device manager as well, without any errors. Just not in the network connections panel.
Now there is some errors in the logs:
So that got me thinking, hmmm what was I doing yesterday. Yesterday I was assuming the hosting company would add another NIC. I saw 3 devices with troubles in device manager:
T20, Win 7 - Missing 'SM Bus Controller' and 'Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller' in Dev Mgr Jump to solution. I'm running Win 7 x64 Ultimate on a new PowerEdge T20, base model. Server 2012 Drivers are WIN8/WIN10 Drivers. Report Unresolved Customer Service Issues here I do not work for Dell. I too am a user.
This page contains the driver installation download for SM Bus Controller in supported models (PowerEdge R210 II) that are running a supported operating system. SM Bus Controller Driver for Dell - PowerEdge R210 II working on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard. Device Name: SM Bus Controller. Loss of functionality for some Intel SMBus Controller devices after you update your system through Windows Update. Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Windows 8.1 Windows 8.1 Enterprise Windows 8.1 Pro Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Windows Server 2012. Some Intel SMBus Controller device drivers. Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows 8 Windows Server 2012 Windows 8.1 Windows Server 2012 R2; The Intel SMBus Controller device provides the operating system with information about the device and hardware. This enables the operating system to display the correct product name for that piece of hardware in Device Manager. Jul 10, 2015 - Run this easy to use Intel Driver Update Utility and it will automatically tell you if you need to. Microsoft Windows* 8.1 x64; Microsoft Windows* Server 2012 R2 x64; Microsoft Windows* 10 x64. And 8 SMBus Host Controller. Download Server Chipset Driver Name changes Intel® Chipset Device Software is the new name for the Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility; this name will be seen when running the installation package. I'm looking for the drivers for the PCI memory controller, PCI data acquisition and signal processing controller, and SM bus controller. Operating system is Windows Server 2012 R2. The drivers listed here for Windows 8.1 work for everything else, but I'm still having issues with these three.
So what I did was the following, I assumed that new hardware was added by the hosting company (which was a wrong assumption) and this would be the PCI Simple Communications Controller. So I tried automatic search for driver software. This failed. Then I figured lets do it manually, and searched for the Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller drivers on the system so that it would install anyway. This failed. Then I uninstalled the driver for the PCI Simple Communications Controller again and left it like that. That's probably when the problem started to appear...
I have Admin access to the server through RDP.
So conclusion: I have a single network adapter physically, can be seen without errors in ipconfig and device manager but not from Network Connections. How do I get it back there?
Never had this issue myself, It's a server, I don't know how far you are willing to go, but here are a couple of possible solutions:
open regedit
Now go to following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlNetwork
In right-side pane, you'll see a binary key 'Config'. Select it and press Delete key on your keyboard. You just need to delete Config key.
Refresh the networking connections folder
And this one:
When this key:
HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlNetworkConnectionsClassManagers
Has multiple GUID's on a single line, it causes an error and the network connections screen becomes empty, moving them to separate lines fixed his issue.
So I finally solved the problem.
I did various stuff to resolve the problem, for example the registry solutions RyanTommons91 proposed, I compared the registry of 2 identical machines (healthy and unhealthy) which learned me nothing, even installed CCcleaner although I would not recommend doing this on any server system. Nothing seemed to solve the problem.
I saved a final solution for the last attempt because it could potentially break my connection to the server. This solution involved removing the Realtek NIC from device manager, and yes, this broke my connection. So if you are reading this while searching for a solution for your problem, don't forget to schedule the task scheduler to reboot your server. This is what I did and 3 min after the server rebooted my connection was back and the NIC was visible again!
To make the task scheduler reboot your server simply open notepad and type the following:
shutdown -r -f -t 0
(where -r means reboot, -f force programs to close, -t time to wait before start up)
Save the file as reboot.bat in C: and create a task in task scheduler to execute this at a specific time in the future.
Description | Type | OS | Version | Date |
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