Are you sure the card is TCP/IP compatible on protocol?

UTP is just a physical link, it needs to support IEEE 802.3 on the data link layer and TCP/IP on the layer above.

flupke11 wrote on 2022-05-24, 18:13:

Are you sure the card is TCP/IP compatible on protocol?

UTP is just a physical link, it needs to support IEEE 802.3 on the data link layer and TCP/IP on the layer above.

I think it is, this very card is emulated in VMware...

OMORES wrote on 2022-05-24, 17:44:

in Windows 10 I can switch to UTP and the led starts blinking...

But do you connect to the network? Do you get an IP address? Can you ping your router?

OMORES wrote on 2022-05-24, 17:44:

Let's assume the card it's working, what can be the problem? Is it the cabling maybe? Am I missing something?

Let's assume nothing about the card without testing it properly.

I can't ping my router...

Well, for such an old 10mbit card there shouldn't be any 64bit SIGNED drivers. But there are... and I can install this card even in Windows 11. (just did it) It does nothing until I select UTP port, then starts blinking... (definitely there is communication at driver level)

If I go with DHCP I get some random IP 169.254.105.24 (see pic).

If I use manual configuration, I can set everything I want with no errors but still nothing works ...

Curios enough Windows troubleshooter says that cable is disconnected... but if I check manually (ipconfig) "media state" is reported disconnected only if I unplug the cable...

Sounds like a broken card to me

I suppose it could also be bad drivers in both cases. I'd try it out with Windows 98 or NT4 before writing it off completely. Windows NT 3.1 isn't the easiest thing to network and Windows 10 is way too new for this card - possibly the signed 64bit drivers found were only intended to be used with emulators/hypervisors and have never been tested against the real hardware.

Would also be worth testing if you can network via the BNC port if you've got the necessary terminators, T connectors and cabling. It will connect to the PCnet chip via an integrated MAU and AUI interface so if there is something wrong with the UTP port it probably won't affect the BNC port unless the pcnet chip itself is bad.

Might be a broken card or some bad drivers, although those for NT 3.1 should be as legit as they can be...

Still, I can't rule out the cabling problem... I will make a crossover cable.

Should be straight to a router in any case.
When a router is auto negotiating , make sure to set the card duplex to auto

Sometimes 10mbit cards have trouble negotiating down from a gigabit connection, if you have a 100mbit switch laying around you could put that in the middle.

gigabit router -> 100mbit switch -> 10mbit card

I tried an old USB to LAN adapter - this one did connect with crossover cable only. (but still no activity) I guess it's a problem with the card itself. After all I did install it on different computers with different drivers with no success.

Anyways, I made some progress connecting NT 3.1 to my network. I found a Winbond 840 PCI 10/100 LAN with NT 3.1 drivers. On NT 3.1, this card works best when is set to 10mbps, half duplex. I didn't found a pattern yet, but I had to install it and uninstall it a couple of times to make it work. I guess updating to SP3 does mess up TCP/IP subsystem.

NT 3.1 can access my shared USB hdd connected to my router (a 2020 TP-Link), also can get along with my wireless printing server . (Btw runs on a i5/4570 directly from SSD. Luckily the motherboard has IDE legacy settings for SATA)

Cards based on AM79c970 should support auto MDI/MDI-x but this card definitely does not support auto negotiation - if you can't force the switch (or generally the other end) to 10mbit mode it might not work, especially in half-duplex. Best to force both the switch and the card to 10mbit/s full duplex mode.