Realtek onboard nic fails to connect

[bazinga81]

Hi

I've decided to run Mint again after not using linux in a realtime environment for a year or so. My main os is win 7 and installed Mint 8, everything is perfect except one thing. My on board NIC just plain wont work.

its a Realtek 8110SC gigabit lan. The board is a Abit ip35 PRO. I plugged in a Belkin USB antenna and im on it right now, no problem. I used that connection to my wifi to run update manager in hopes it would function after a reboot, still no luck with onboard nic. So i decided to manually install the nic driver via Realteks drivers. Still not connecting. So updated the kernel to 2.6.31-21 from 2.6.31-13. Still no luck.

Lastly, i decided to burn a copy of fedora 12. Booted into live cd. Even Fedora fails to connect! I'm thinking of just going back to virtualbox and running ubuntu in a VM, it works flawlessly with virtual nic drivers.

the strange thing is i had a copy of ubuntu 8.04 laying around, and booted into the live cd, and my nic works fine. I'm at a loss here

any help would be appreciated. I do have a PCIe NIC card laying around, an el cheapo rosewill. I might install it, and see what happens instead of using the on board.

[bazinga81]

does anyone have any ideas on this?

I thought i had an extra nic laying around, but its lost. I'm off today, think im going to run down to micro center and pick up Netgear or Dlink nic. Instead of trying to trouble shoot any more.

if anyone has any ideas on this though, would be most grateful! its just to weird for it not to work in multiple distros, but works fine in windows.