Quote Originally Posted by H1ghlander
Check out the last post on page 3. That has the ethtool -e output from the ZE4100 which works correctly. There are definitely some registers that are different. However, I don't have a clue what those difference mean.
I have the documentation for the DP83815 chip (available as a PDF from the Nat.Semi. site). I'll try to make some sense out of what your ZE4100 settings are telling us and contrast then to the other NIC. It may take me a few days to get to it and the documentation is 108 pages and most of that is setting up the nic registers (and somewhat cryptic to me), so please be patient and don't expect any answers tonight or tomorrow. I would still suggest that you also check what the other programs I mentioned above give you. I don't know why, but I got different results on my NIC from the differet tools. I'm more inclined to trust the other two tools, particularly the natsemi-diag that is made for a natsemi chip (but also the mii-diag) over ethtool when the programs do not agree.

What I really would like you to do if you are willing is to run the natsemi-diag on both notebooks with both the -e and -ee options (-ee seems to be needed to get the raw data, which is what we'll want to put back into the corrupted eeproms). The -e option will also give us an interpeted discription of what it thinks the eeproms are set for, which should be a big help. natsemi-diag does need to be run as root or with the sudo command prefix. And if you are brave you might want to try the -E option (which from reading the source code I find should do an "emergency rewrite" of the eeprom, which might resolve this for us.) Having the mii-tool -r work around, I haven't been brave enough to try this yet.

If we can get the eeprom values right again, then at power up the registers should be put in a valid mode. The National Semi NIC does work under Knoppix (as your ZE4100 shows and my 4240 did show before I ran the "security updates").