Unable to install Network drivers in Dell inspiron 5160

[V.V.S. Kambli]

Recently my laptop?s hard drive crashed. I have a Dell inspiron 5160 laptop with me from past 5 years and dont know why suddenly its hard driver crash for no reason.
Not getting too deep into the issue I simply bought a new hard drive and installed it also alongside I reinstalled my windows XP Home premium OS. Installed all the drivers including the video driver and chipsets, but then I installed the default listed network drivers in the CD which was provided to me. Now the issue is that when I check all the installed drivers I am able to see all the drivers installed properly but only unable see the network driver in the installed list. Is there anything wrong with the installation I did, please help me out; I am unable to make out what exactly went wrong.

[HamsiniI]

May I know where did you checked in the system in order to make sure that all the drivers are installed properly in your machine, are you sure you checked them from the Device manager option. Did you find any kind of mark beside or on Network driver?s option which was quite different from other installed drivers? Also if possible just let me know from where exactly you installed those successfully installed driver and this network driver.

[Gaganvihari]

I can probably help you not perfectly but at least by providing you with a proper network to be installed. I guess the driver which you have installed is faulty so better you download it from THIS LINK.

[JoanaJhon]

Hey I do agree with the above post, I am sure that you must have installed the faulty network driver and maybe other drivers are correctly installed. The thing is that as you yourself told that the network driver was installed from the CD provided to you, therefore surely the CD must have contained a corrupt driver.
Better you remove that driver from your system and reinstall it again, but from the above link which is provided to you or else just uninstall the entire driver and then again install them only from Dell?s official site (Support.dell.com).

[V.V.S. Kambli]

May I know where did you checked in the system in order to make sure that all the drivers are installed properly in your machine, are you sure you checked them from the Device manager option. Did you find any kind of mark beside or on Network driver?s option which was quite different from other installed drivers?

Yeah, you are right I check all the drivers in the Device Manager using two different paths:

• Right Click My Computer > Manage > Device Manager
• Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Administrator Tools > Computer Management > Device Manger

As expected both the paths landed me at the same place and showed me the same yellow marked result, the network driver was marked with yellow question mark.

[Raj Desai]

Better you remove that driver from your system and reinstall it again, but from the above link which is provided to you or else just uninstall the entire driver and then again install them only from Dell?s official site (Support.dell.com).

Uninstalling and reinstalling doesn?t make any difference at least for me. Even I am having few problems with the driver installation, even though I have installed all the drivers perfectly then too whenever I check out the Device Manager I can see a yellow mark on all the listed driver. I mean none of the driver in my machine has been installed properly.

I uninstalled them number of times from the control panel and then reinstalled them but nothing worked they still exist with the yellow mark. Is there any alternate suggestion you could probably give me.

[PaK PoK]

Hey dude, this is where you are committing the mistake. Once you have installed a driver and if you find its defected don?t just simply delete it or remove it from the ?Add and Remove Programs? option, they actually don?t get removed properly from the system. deleting the driver from the computer and then reinstalling it again creates more problem than before so therefore stop playing with removing and reinstalling drivers.

Better you use an uninstaller in order to remove your drivers from the system completely. There are many uninstallers available for uninstalling drivers, you just have to download it and run it onto your machine, once you run it all the drivers will be automatically be removed completely. And after that you can easily reinstall a fresh new driver without any issue. Try it.

[robot.txt]

As expected both the paths landed me at the same place and showed me the same yellow marked result, the network driver was marked with yellow question mark.

How it is possible that only your network drivers has not been properly installed, there may be other drivers too which must be showing you the same yellow question mark (defected or improper drivers). Check out the Device Manager again and make sure how many yellow marks you see in it.
I probably suspect that you must have attempted to install the chipset driver before even attempting to install any other device.

[V.V.S. Kambli]

Thanks a lot for the guidance you are providing me and sorry for ignoring other suspected drivers. I do see another driver in the network adapter named as 1395 adapter and I see some other Ethernet controller devices in other devices with the same result.

And as you suspected, yes I already installed the chipset drivers before even installing the other drivers. Other than this I would also like to give some alternate related information, in the Add and remove option I can also see some Broadcom software installed in my machine, should I uninstall the Broadcom software too?

[Bala Murugan S]

No let the Broadcom software be as it is, it has nothing to do with the driver installation issue. Just try to install the chipset drivers again if possible and then attempt the network drivers. I mean, first you uninstall the network driver and then install the chipset driver and then again install the network driver. I hope you didn?t add much data to your hard drive after the now fresh OS installation.

If in case nothing works then unfortunately you will have to go around with all the process again i.e. from installing the Windows OS again to installing the drivers.