Network Driver Error Code 10

Calamity1911 · August 25, 2020

I recently got a new motherboard and CPU, and once I went to get Windows 10 installed on it, the network drivers don't install. In device manager, it lists error code 10 ("This device cannot start. Code 10").

The motherboard I have is an MSI MAG B550M Bazooka, and the listed Ethernet chipset by them is the "Realtek RTL8111HN Gigabit LAN," but I also noticed that the device manager is reporting a Hardware ID for a regular RTL8111 or an RTL8168.

Either way, I downloaded the listed Ethernet driver, and it claimed it successfully installed, so I rebooted. Nope.

I used device manager to uninstall the driver, and then booted into safe mode to install the driver. Nope, still error code 10. I rebooted still in safe mode, and did the Have Disk method of installing drivers. The driver package given by MSI shows 2 options. Neither worked. Still error code 10.

I did a little hunting online and saw that there might be a couple bad registry values, so I followed the guides. They had you go to something like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\[some GUID for network adapters] and there should've been a couple entries you should delete, but they weren't there for me.

I then tried some troubleshooting program from Realtek itself, and it didn't even see the GbE controller, but it found my USB Bluetooth adapter just fine. So I tried what should've been a universal installer from them that claimed to support both a bunch of RTL8111 versions and RTL8168 versions. Same error code, even repeating all steps.

Then I caved and reinstalled windows and repeated the whole process, to no avail.

If anyone has any info on what's going on, it would be greatly appreciated. If you need any more info, let me know. I might not get back to you right away because I've been working on this all day so far, and I need a bit of a break.