Network adapter not showing in device manager

[sonicyouth]

dear old techies,

We had a big storm here at the weekend and lightning must have struck nearish the house (if not the house itself) as the power went out followed by sparks from near the telephone and the internet went down. The router itself was still functioning but couldn't connect to the DSL - status showed nothing for signal noise, up/down attenuation - so I suspected the microfilter but had to go away for a few days so didn't have chance to look at it properly. In my absence my father in law decided to order a new modem/router which only arrived today. After setting up the new router and switching out the microfilter the internet worked fine using the ethernet port on my laptop and via wireless. The old microfilter rattled when I took it out.

Before I went away I noticed that the wireless devices were connecting to the router without any problem but all of the desktop PCs connected via ethernet showed that the ethernet cable was disconnected in Windows and on the router itself. Despite having tried a combination of different known good cables in each of the PCs they all still have the same issue - the local area network adapter is not visible in the control panel or in device manager. They're both on board adapters and are enabled in the BIOS. The ethernet ports on the router are not the issue because I could use ethernet on my laptop.

The PCs were turned off during the storm but were obviously connected to the router which was switched on - is it possible that the network adapters are both dead because of the storm?

[Samdy Gray]

Can you try the NIC in another PCIe slot?

[sonicyouth]

they're both on board NICs

[Samdy Gray]

Ah.

Could well be that the lightning surge knocked out the network adapters. Only way to test would be to try a different NIC in the PC.

Are the status lights still flashing?

[sonicyouth]

No lights on the ports on either the PC or router when cable is connected.

Haven't got a NIC that isn't an on board jobby sadly

[Batch]

And presumably nothing showing in 'scan for changes' on device manager. Not sounding hopeful is it!

[sonicyouth]

Nope! Nothing at all.

I was going to just buy two new cards and move on but they're fucking expensive here and will take days to arrive

[Batch]

Well, other than disabling them in bios, rebooting, turning them back on in bios,  I'm not sure what else to do

[sonicyouth]

Tried that as well.

I think next time I hear thunder I'm going to unplug everything!

[Samdy Gray]

If there's no status lights then I reckon they're fried.

Lucky the surge didn't knock out the whole mobo!