• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Help! Lost MAC address.

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

trents

Senior Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
I installed my new ASRock 780G mobo earlier this week. I flashed to the most recent bios and restarted the computer. After doing some stress testing in Prime95 at default bios settings to for stability of bios flash (it was stable) I restarted and was tinkering with the settings in bios to try to get it to work in DDR2 1066 mode. I then restarted but computer wouldn't boot. So, I powered it down, switched off the psu and jumpered the cmose to reset it. It booted up okay but I got this message on post:

"MAC address doesn't match either cmos or flash" or something clsoe to that. "Press F1 to continue". Pressing F1 allows the boot and Windows load to continue but the onboard LAN is not functional. MAC address is now 00.00.00.00.00.00. It appears I wiped the encoded MAC address from the hardware somehow.

I've sent an email to ASRock tech last night but in the meantime is there a way to fix this without RMAing the board or buying a NIC pci card?
 
Last edited:
Im not even sure how you could do that with a cmos reset. Unless the cmos just cant read the mac address off the chipset for some reason.

Did you try restoring default settings after the reset?
 
Wow. I thought that MACs were hard coded to the device, or at least in a non-eraseable part of the device's eprom. I'd highly suspect a faulty mobo if that happened to me.
 
Im not even sure how you could do that with a cmos reset. Unless the cmos just cant read the mac address off the chipset for some reason.

Did you try restoring default settings after the reset?

Yep, I tried restoring default settings after the reset. I also reflashed the bios to the original version but that didn't solve the problem either.
 
Fixed! Had to email ASRock tech support twice before they responded but today they emailed me a utility to restore the hard MAC address and now I have on board LAN again and a PCI slot freed up.
 
Back