Hello,

in our plant we have rather old PCS 7 v7.1 system which consists of two redundant servers and two OS client stations. The installation is about 10 years old. There was a fault on the motherboard of one OS client station. We had a spare one from the same manufacturer (Fujitsu) very similar but not the same. After motherboard was replaced, OS client booted without any problems, but this new motherboard has different integrated NIC (Broadcom instead of Yukon). The operating system on the client OS is windows XP SP3. When trying to set up the IP address, there is a message that this address is already set up to the non present NIC adapter (which is now hidden because it is not physically present anymore). 

I had this problem before after virtualization of different machines but it was relatively easy to solve using this guide: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1179

However this time it doesn't work. When trying to uninstall hidden NIC in device manager I get error message "Failed to uninstall the device. Device may be required to boot up computer" which is odd.

What could I try to solve this? I guess it should be possible without new download from ES.

Thank you.

Hi Aden,

Go through the below link to know the uninstallation of non present NIC card

How to Remove Hidden/Ghost Network Adapters in Windows?

Please try a fresh download from ES with new IP address to OS, if the above link does not solve your problem.

Hi Techno Taru and thank you for the reply. Unfortunately, this link doesn't help because it describes the same procedure I alredy used (in the kb vmware link I posted).

However, I have managed to find a workaround and need to wait until the plant is in downtime. I'll remove HDD from the second OS client and store it in the safe place, put a new one inside, restore image from the first OS client and boot to windows. Then, I'll uninstall drivers and remove NIC from the device manager and during first reboot go to BIOS and disable onboard LAN adapter. After that, I'll boot to windows and make backup image without onboard NIC.

I'll return everything back to normal on the other OS client machine and I'll restore newly created image on the OS client machine on which I have NIC conflict. During first boot windows will recognize new NIC and I'll install drivers. Now, I'll be able to set correct IP address. All this without download from ES, because I had a bad experience on previous occasion.

This should work.