ESXi 4.0 does not detect new NIC Intel 1000/PRO MT Dual Port
I recently upgraded my ESXi to 4.0. Now I have just installed an Intel 1000/PRO MT Dual Port NIC and EXSi does not recognize it. It does not show up in the list of available network adapters. I rebooted the ESXi twice but still the NIC does not show up.
I have seen other post talking about this problem. They suggest to re-install ESXi 4.0 from scratch. It there a way to force ESXi to detect the card without starting from scratch.
I just installed the drivers for Intel NIC from the VMWare ESXi 4.0 download but it still does not detect the NIC.
The thing is, I have another ESXi 4.0 where the same NIC model PRO/1000 MT is working but the difference is that this NIC was installed while the ESX was at 3.5 then it was upgraded to 4.0 with the NIC already in place.
I don't know what server platform you have but try reassigning interrupts if that is an option. There are utilities that can do that. Try changing slots.
Thanks TobiasKracht , your answer point me in the righ direction. Indded the checksum of this NIC was corrupted. So I used ibautil.exe to restaure the default configuration which set the checksum correctly. I then ran into the next problem. The ESXi e1000 driver would fail again with the follow error : Invalid MAC address. I then found out that this NIC's EPROM had been previously corrupted by a third party windows TCP/IP driver. The driver had overwritten the built-in MAC address with some invalid addresses. Windows would not have a problem with these MAC address but ESXi would not accept them. A few forum later I found the Intel eeupdate.exe utility and I was able to restore the original MAC address. It is working ok now.
