How long Should a MB Last? I lost all Ethernet connectivity after 2.5 years

[macdoc5]

Hi,
My 'work' Hackintosh is a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H running Mountain Lion until last month. Soon after I upgraded to Mavericks (Not Yosemite as some software isn't compatible), I started having random freezes on startup. Now, I can't get either onboard ethernet card to connect. The Intel port will show a network address for 2 seconds and then loose it for another 30. The Atheros port never worked from the start.

I tried plugging in an old Rosewill RC-401 ethernet card. It uses a Marvell Yukon chip and although OS X sees the card, it can't obtain a network address either. Same result with a random USB-Ethernet adaptor.

This MB has been running 9 hours a day for 2.5 years. Is it possible the MB is just bad? I have a newer Rosewill ethernet card on the way from Amazon ($9 with a Realtek chip). If that fails, any chance I would get a better result from a Wifi card?

I have tried a complete clean install without success as well.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Jeff

 

[Bob_the_Tomato]

One way to test if the problem is software related or hardware is to boot another OS. Do you have a Windows disk to boot from? How about a Live Linux CD? If it gets a good IP when using those OS's then the problem is software related and you need to troubleshoot your setup.