I am running an HP laptop with Windows 8.1. For the past year or so I have used the wired connection without issue. The other day I get home from work to realize I have no network connection. As I went through troubleshooting steps I realized that there is no wired Ethernet adapter in the device manager. All I see is this:

When I enable "show hidden devices" This is what I see: 

There just doesn't seem to be a wired adapter even recognized by Windows, flat out vanished! The wireless works just fine, however I would really rather use the wired connection for a lot of what I do. Some of the troubleshooting steps I have done so far:

1. run sfc /scannow

2. Run chkdsk

3. Ran a Windows Repair

4. Restored Windows using the restore partition

5. Found the manufacturer ethernet drivers and installed them hoping the adapter would show up

I'm starting to think that it may be a hardware issue, I've just never seen an integrated network adapter fail without other motherboard issues.Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. There are no "unknown devices" in device manager

• Edited by Acreed02 17 hours 0 minutes ago

no wired Ethernet adapter in the device manager. All I see is this:
[Wi-Fi Adapter]

I think I saw that once with my TouchSmart but the reverse case, all I had was Wired, no Wi-Fi and the slider switch on the front would not work (always showing orange, never switching to blue).  I can't remember exactly what I did to get it switched around but as I recollect I went into the BIOS and flipped something.

So, have you checked your BIOS and tried toggling anything relevant?  E.g. you could probably toggle your Wi-Fi off. 

Also, do you have Bluetooth?  You might be restricted to having it with one or the other.  Seeing Bluetooth PAN in your Network adapters would have been a clue about that but not seeing it doesn't preclude you from having it.

HTH

Hi Robert, thanks for the reply.

I checked the BIOS and disabled the wireless, that just leaves me without the ability to connect to a network at all :(

There doesn't seem to be anything else in the BIOS relevant to the issue. I don't have bluetooth, although I wouldn't understand why that would cause a problem suddenly, although we are talking about Windows here!

My first guess would been that the actual port went bad, but with nothing in the device manager for a wired NIC I'd assume that the whole thing went bad, but I would also expect the MOBO to be bad as well then. I suppose it's possible that just the integrated NIC went bad, but if I were a gambling man I would wager that it's not a hardware issue.

Any further assistance or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

don't have bluetooth, although I wouldn't understand why that would cause a problem suddenly, although we are talking about Windows here!

Some recent updates seem to have hit Bluetooth users and made it completely disappear too.  For one of those incidents I suggested a WMIC query.  Maybe a similar query would find something for you.

Unfortunately I don't have LAN ports on my Surface but on W10TP there apparently is at least one but no Bluetooth (that I can find) and (strangely?) this works on it:

wmic.exe sysdriver where (DisplayName like "%Blue%") list brief

I'll have to try to figure out how to identify whatever it is that W10TP thinks it has.  BTW this will help me too because I am still not connected with it at all.   ; )

Oh.  sysdriver is not the right "alias".  This works too but isn't showing me the "adapter"

wmic.exe sysdriver where (DisplayName like "%Netw%") list brief

It's  nic, I think

wmic.exe nic  list brief

and then I can get full details for the one I want with

C:\>wmic.exe nic where (DeviceID="0") list full /format:list

There are some Error and Status fields seen that way.

HTH

I am unfamiliar with WMIC queries, so that looks like a foreign language to me. Would you mind breaking it down to the commands I should type to see if I can locate the adapter? I do appreciate the help.

Would you mind breaking it down to the commands I should type to see if I can locate the adapter?

Try the

wmic.exe  nic  list  brief

Then you will see where I got the DeviceID valuename from.  ; )

It's really not that complicated once you get used to it.  Easier and more productive than the equivalent PowerShell queries IMO.

Here's the Help

wmic.exe  /?

Hopefully those nic queries will be enough.  Otherwise there is

wmic.exe Path Win32_PnPEntity where (PNPDeviceID="devid") Get /format:list

where devid is a DeviceID you would get from other sources.  For example, using the second nic query I gave I could just extract the line from it which starts PNPDeviceID= and plug that in between the quotes.  But it was not that simple unfortunately because there were some backslash characters in the full PNPDeviceID that I had to escape (e.g. by doubling each).  Alternatively, you could use another "like" match (standard ISQL syntax) where you picked a sufficiently unique chunk that could be found without such syntax problems to overcome (provided you satisfied like's syntax quirks <eg>).

 
FYI