(offtopic) Managed to erase my ethernet card id.

[xanatose]

A laptop I have, had a weird problem in wich it did not want to turn off and stayed in the bios startup sequence. I managed to turn it off by disconnecting it and taking the battery away. Bad idea. It reset the laptop, but erased the ethernet id of the internal card. Now its listed as 0:0:0:0:0

Other than that the laptop seem to be working fine. I wonder, if there is  a software trick to set a dummy id number for an ethernet card.

[Mark Jones]

Hi, I think by "ethernet ID" you mean the Ethernet MAC Address. Check in your BIOS, it probably has some setting for specifying a MAC or using a default MAC. My last two desktops had built-in NICs with their MACs not specified and they worked fine. It shouldn't be a big problem if the MAC address changes also, just power off and power on the router or whatever it connects to, and it should detect the new MAC as a "new" device.

Oh, and be sure to "Load the Defaults" in the BIOS options, that might help.

[vanjast]

A late reply.. but anyway..
If you're able to lose your MAC addy it means that your card can be set into 'promiscuous mode' - packet sniffing, and other 'evil'  :toothy thingies.
You might find that that there is a 'netbios' flash on that card (which set's the MAC), and the bios chip has been blown or erased. Find out what type of card it is from the laptop maker website - there are probably utilities to flash all the bios's here.

The MAC addy should be unique with manufacturer ID.. etc, so you might have to have the laptop serial number available.
:U