I have two IBM A30 laptops. Both dual boot between RH8.0 and Win2K Pro.

I ran Knoppix 3.1 from CD on Laptop A a month or so ago and later noticed that the Win2K network adapter wasn't working anymore. It can see traffic if I put it in promiscuous mode, but it won't get an IP address via DHCP and setting a static IP address doesn't work either.

After connecting a sniffer to the same segment, I saw NO traffic coming from my laptop. I tried to generate packets by telnetting to servers, pinging, even doing a release/renew on my DHCP address. Again, zero traffic. Not even an ARP request. The sniffer was working because I could see broadcast traffic from other machines.

The goofy thing is that the Red Hat partition works fine. It gets an IP via DHCP and I can cruise the Internet without error.

Today I downloaded and ran Knoppix 3.2 (from CD) on Laptop B. Immediately after booting back into the Windows partition, the same problem has now occured. The network settings for the Linux partition work fine, but the Windows partition can't transmitt.

I can't imaine how this could be caused by Knoppix, but since I saw it happen twice, I can't believe that this is a random coincidence either.

Any thoughts? I couldn't find anything that seemed to relate in the existing posts or through Google'ing, but maybe I'm missing something. If nothing else I can reinstall the Windows partition *sic*.

-Don