I have a Gigabyte MB with a Marvel Yukon onboard NIC. Not sure what happened, but I had my camera hooked up to my USB 2.0 connection and lost keyboard, mouse, network, and it would not boot up correctly. I managed to recover everything but my Network Adapter. When I go to Dev Mgr, I can only see it if I choose 'show hidden devices'. It says it is working properly, and I can ping 127.0.0.1 successfully, but I do not have a link light and there is not an adapter shown in Network Connections. I have tried to reinstall the drivers but it fails. I can disable the NIC but can't uninstall. What gives? Thanks for any feedback!!

Physically remove the adapter, uninstall the drivers, reboot. CHeck Device Manager to make sure nothing is checked or has an exclaimation point beside it, then power down and reinstall the adapter and reboot. Your laptop *should* automatically detect the new device and reinstall the drivers If that doesn't work and you have a System Restore point you can try rolling back to see if that recovers it. If you don't have a restore point you can try installing the original registry backup (crated the first time the laptop booted up) but you're probably looking at a trip to the repair shop.