New router - red X showing in the bottom right corner

Since my old router kept dropping the connection, the technician swapped it out for a new mobile router (a ZTE MF283V), and honestly, the only real difference is that this one lets you tweak the MTU and MSS settings—I’ve set them to 1430 and 1390. The swap itself took maybe a minute, but ever since the new unit went live, my PC has been stuck showing a red "X" on the network icon. The internet works perfectly fine on every other computer and all the Wi-Fi devices; everything is rock solid except for this one specific machine. I’ve already swapped the Ethernet cable, performed multiple factory resets, tried the whole `ipconfig /flushdns` and `renew` routine, and even nuked the network configuration from the registry, but nothing sticks. I checked the BIOS, and while the onboard LAN hardware shows as enabled, hitting enter on "Smart LAN" just displays "link detected 1Gbps, cable length less than 10m." The LEDs on both the PC and the router indicate a physical connection, yet that red "X" persists. Is this a hardware failure, or am I looking at some kind of software glitch? I’d rather fix this myself before I call in the pros. I still need to try plugging into a neighbor's router to isolate the issue, but the tech already hauled away the old unit once he saw the new one was up. Interestingly, when I tether my phone via USB, the internet works flawlessly. Any advice is appreciated; this situation is genuinely baffling to me.

It was throwing code 10 in Device Manager for the network adapters. After a reboot, the network adapters disappeared from Device Manager entirely, and now when I run the troubleshooter, Windows claims it can't find a driver for the network adapter.

Maybe it’d be easiest to just boot some live Linux from a USB stick to see how the network card behaves. If the internet is still dead there, you’re probably looking at a hardware issue—but if it works, then something is definitely wonky with Windows.

https://forums.techguy.org/threads/n...1258017/page-2

I actually started a thread over on an international forum, so if anyone wants to follow along, I’ll be digging much deeper into the solution over there.

Alright, I'm going to give the live Linux approach a shot. I'll track down a tutorial to get everything flashed onto a USB drive.

I downloaded Linux Mint and flashed it to a thumb drive using BalenaEtcher, but now I’m hitting a wall trying to boot from the USB. When I hit F12, I get that menu with USB-FDD, USB-ZIP, USB-CDROM, and USB-HDD, but regardless of which one I pick, the system just bypasses it and boots straight into Windows like nothing happened. I’ve tried plugging the drive into different ports—both the front and the back—but no luck. I honestly have no clue what I’m doing wrong here. Is there some specific setting in the BIOS I need to tweak to make this work?

For context, the motherboard is a G31MX-S2 and it has integrated LAN.
To save myself all this headache, would it be feasible to just grab an old network card from a buddy or buy a new one? Is that even a viable workaround?

Edit: I finally managed to boot into Linux Mint, but it's just a black screen with an 'x' and absolutely nothing works.

I installed the network card and it’s up and running now. 👍

Forgot to get back to you...

Glad you got it sorted! I guess maybe a lightning strike fried the integrated chip or something?