Have you encountered difficulties with your Ethernet connection?
Have you encountered difficulties with your Ethernet connection?
Hello,
I bought an Arris SB8200 cable modem to replace my old Linksys device. I still have a Cisco Linksys E2500 router. I reached out to my Xfinity provider to connect the new modem. I have Wi-Fi but no Ethernet connection. When I run Windows diagnostics, it reports:
"An Ethernet cable is not properly plugged in or might be broken."
My concern is whether the router has suddenly failed. All lights were green and working before, and now with the new modem I’m losing Ethernet too. I double-checked the cables and everything still shows green. I’m feeling frustrated because I think something is wrong.
It's improbable. The initial assumption is that the link speed is configured to 1GE instead of auto-negotiation.
Apologies for the delay. Thank you for your responses. I contacted Xfinity to report my lack of internet, only to discover they didn’t transfer my account from the previous modem to the new one. They dismissed my claim as a joke. They eventually fixed the issue, but I’m still facing problems setting up Ethernet. I connected a cable from the router to the laptop to reach the IP address in admin settings to generate the username and password for the modem, yet it doesn’t work. The cable itself is fine—no hardware issues detected. This seems to be an old router, as mentioned earlier. Could this be the reason they can’t grant me access on the laptop? Should I consider replacing the router? I understand it’s outdated.
What does IPCONFIG /all reveal about the ethernet port? Does it show a disconnected state, suggesting a hardware problem, or is the port operational but lacks valid IP addresses? If you don’t receive an IP address yet but the port remains active, there are several possibilities. The first step would be to reset the router to factory settings, ensuring no previous configurations interfere. If the router was ever set to bridge mode, it won’t assign DHCP IPs. Should this not resolve the issue, you might attempt to manually configure the IP, mask, and gateway within the appropriate range for your device. This assumes the router is functional but experiencing unusual DHCP behavior.
That was a lot of effort.
There is a sticky someplace on one of the main forums that tell how to post photos/screen caps.
So first it seems you have some other router that you are connecting to via wifi. It is using a very uncommon ipblock. It is perfectly valid private IP block it is just not commonly used by home users. I don't think it is your linksys but maybe?
This is not causing the ethernet issue. You can actually have both the ethernet and wifi connected to the same router or even different routers. Not really recommended unless you really know what you are doing.
When it is in a disconnected state it generally means there is some kind of hardware issue.
Do you have any other equipment you can test with. Key is to determine if it is the pc the router or maybe the cable.
What you could do is plug the pc directly into the modem to test. You likely would have to reboot the modem. The modem locks onto the first mac address it sees and if you change what you plug in you have to reboot it. Your pc should actually get a public IP address. You at least want to verify that the port does not still say disconnected.
This is not something you want to leave connected any longer than you need to for testing.
If this also does not work then I am not so sure. It is most times bad cables but the only other option tends to be a bad port on the pc which you can't really fix. This is very basic electical thing at the hardware level so it is not likely a device driver.
If this works then it become a bit more problematic. Do the lights on the router change when you plug cables in. The router maybe in some strange state. Factory reset tends to be the only option. If the router lost the firmware it becomes a challenge. Most new routers have a way to recover them, it is still rather tedious. Its been so long I forget about linksys. Cisco sold them many years ago. The best search is for your router and the term "bricked" or "brick". Many times you find instructions on how to recover router because people attempt to load third party firmware and mess it up. Some get rather crazy like soldering a serial connection to the router motherboard.
Then again you can find many routers for under $50 that will be massively better than yours. I think the new name for the technology it uses is wifi4 but better called 802.11n
As mentioned before, connecting the laptop through an ethernet cable directly to the modem and restarting the modem might indicate a problem with the laptop's NIC. It could be faulty or misconfigured—checking the Ethernet settings and ensuring DHCP is enabled in IPv4 settings would help. If everything seems correct for the Ethernet adapter, the issue might lie with the drivers, so updating them is recommended. Should the drivers still work, the port may be defective, requiring a replacement motherboard. If all else fails, consider replacing it with a new Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Fiber.