Solved
Looking for Broadcom drivers for WinXP that will work on PowerEdge 2650
Posted on 2013-05-20
I'm trying to get a Dell PowerEdge 2650 running again. Before it died (RAID controller issue) it was running Windows 2000 Server just fine. Now that I've got the RAID issue resolved, I want to put Windows XP on it because VirtualBox does not support Win2k. I've got XP installed. Windows setup installed the default Broadcom drivers for the built-in NICs. Here's the problem... they don't work. When the NIC is connected to a switch and enabled in Windows, XP says the LAN cable is unplugged and there is no link light on the NIC. On the switch port, the link light about once per second. If I go into Network Connections in XP and right-click an adapter and choose Disable, Windows shows that the NIC has been disabled, BUT now the link lights on both ends work (even showing activity)! I've tried uninstalling the NICs through Device Manager and allowing Windows to re-install them. Same thing. I've downloaded the driver for this specific Dell service tag. I had to burn it to a CD because it was too big for a floppy disk (USB support is still not working... just like when it was running Win2k. I thought XP would fix that). The setup program says that it requires Windows 2003 or Windows 2008. When can I get an XP driver for this machine? Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks.