No Ethernet connection after failed windows update

[janus]

My windows 10 desktop installed the latest windows update on Wednesday morning - unfortunately there was little disk space available and so it failed… it then took me 5 hours to get it to launch windows again successfully… I think it tried to undo the update, but that failed for the same reason.

However, I have lost my Ethernet controller - I still have Wi-Fi though for my phone/iPad/tv… so assume hub&cable are fine. By booting into safe mode, I was eventually able to uninstall the driver today, but when I try to reinstall it, it gives the error “one of the installers for this device cannot perform the installation at this time”… it’s intel I219-v Ethernet controller driver pack downloaded from the intel site - makes no difference if I use the installer or device manager, I get the error message - even in safe mode. Tried a network reset (both in windows and cmd) in the hope that might restore it, but no.

I don’t have any system restore points, so that is not an option; the pc manufacturer are no longer trading, so no help there; I’ve tried the network troubleshooter, but that just tells me to install a driver for the network adapter - helpful 🙄

I feel like I’ve tried most solutions I’ve found on Google but none work so far… hopefully some network expert here might have some ideas to try… there must be something obvious I’m missing!

I know the nuclear option is to reinstall Windows 10, but not at that stage yet… it did occur to me to download the win10 iso from Microsoft and use it to see if I can repair windows with that, but can only d/l on my android phone and the sd card has a 4gb file size limit and the iso is nearly 6gb… so might need to backup card and format to exfat.

any ideas?

[carl_pearce]

What is the state of the Ethernet adapter in Device Manager?

[jpeg1 · Accepted solution]

Can you ask a friend to download the ISO, and hand it to you on a USB stick?  It would be good to add some memory to the PC first. 

[goslow]

Certainly no shortage of online articles about connection problems with that device!

Have you tried uninstalling the device via device manager as per

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000058304/ethernet-products.html?productId=...

and particularly noting point 6 about the option to delete driver software

When you reinstall the driver, are you installing the driver only or is it adding a whole load of Intel bloatware for 'managing' the device? I always opt for driver-only installation where possible.

[Tudor]

Thinking on another tack, how about purchasing a USB to Ethernet adapter, they are fairly cheap and the cost would probably be less than all the hours you put in trying to fix the current one.

[janus]

it was listed under "Other Devices" and had a yellow exclamation triangle with I think a green question mark behind it.

[janus]

I got a friend to split it into 3 rar's and uploaded online - d/l on the phone, moved them to the pc and extracted the iso... burning to a DL DVD failed verify (probably burned too fast), but mounting the iso worked fine, the repair began and a few hours later, I was online again - I ran another windows update, enabled restore points and everything running smoothly again! lesson learned for the future!

with regards to memory, if you mean RAM, then it has 16GB (which I think is the max for this PC); if you mean HDD, then ironically I bought another 8TB external drive a fortnight ago... the issue is that downloads go to the main drive and if that gets full, then updates seemingly become a nightmare... i'm moving my d/l files away from the main drive and onto another external drive to hopefully prevent this from reoccurring.

[janus]

it was just a driver pack, but I could have lived with bloat if it had got me online again!

[janus]

as this happened over the Christmas period, it was just a minor, but annoying, inconvenience - I had Wi-Fi, so there were temporary workarounds... I knew it was a software issue, so i'd be reluctant to throw money after hardware unless absolutely necessary - though a usb cable from the pc to the ipad might be a useful future investment!

[Adduxi]

Get another bigger HDD and clone your existing System drive to this new bigger drive.  The cloning software should make the system (windows) partition proportionally bigger and get you out of this particular problem.  I've done this many times over the years.