Company: Elisa Research Inc. Date: 05/23/97 By: Henry Symptom: Sometimes when installing the driver in a WinNT, the following error message appears: "Setup is unable to obtain network adapter information from the associated network adapter DLL files. Operation cannot continue." The same problem is reported by Don, SMSC together with a solution. Investigation: After two-day investigation. We found two things will affect the result of the installation: 1. the DLLs (LAN9000.DLL and LANNCDET.DLL) in the directory (default is \winnt\system32) 2. the content of the NetCardDlls in the registry case 1: With a fresh installed NT, DLLs does not exist and the content of NetCardDlls is clean. Duing installation, the INF checks NetCardDlls to see if LANNCDET.DLL is in it. Since it is not, it will a. Copy the DLLs to the designated directory and b. Add LANNCDET.DLL to NetCardDlls. case 2: After DLLs (in directory) and LANNCDET.DLL (in NetCardDlls) are put in place, new installation will NOT copy the DLLs (from floppy to hard drive) because INF detects the existence of LANNCDET.DLL in NetCardDlls. This means a new installation will NOT override the DLLs in the directory. So if user wants to do a new installation and also use the new DLLs in the floppy, he will need to MANUALLY copy the DLLs over (as Dos's solution). One very confusing senario is the following: On an already installed NT, user deletes the DLLs manually (without copying over the new ones). And since DLLs are no longer existed, he would expect that the new installation will automatically copy the DLLs for him. Wrong! The INF will detect the existence of the LANNCDET.DLL in the NetCardDlls in the registry, it will not copy the DLLs. And since there is no DLLs, the same error message shown before will appear. From the above observation, it says: 1. If user likes to use the new DLLs, he needs to manually copy them over. 2. If DLLs are not in directory but LANNCDET.DLL is in NetCardDlls, all the following installation will fail. We did another experiment which is to copy the DLLs over regardless the contents of NetCardDlls (so that the new DLLs override the old ones in each installation). If failed with a "Copy violation error". The reason is that once INF reaches a certain step, ALL DLLs (not just the two we concern) are locked and any attempt to override them will trigger the violation error. Since NetCardDlls also plays a big role in the installation, we tried a few experiments but all failed. Deleting it from the registery causes more unseen errors in the installation. Cleaning up its content did almost the same thing. Our suggestion is not to have user touches it.Download Driver Pack
After your driver has been downloaded, follow these simple steps to install it.
Expand the archive file (if the download file is in zip or rar format).
If the expanded file has an .exe extension, double click it and follow the installation instructions.
Otherwise, open Device Manager by right-clicking the Start menu and selecting Device Manager.
Find the device and model you want to update in the device list.
Double-click on it to open the Properties dialog box.
From the Properties dialog box, select the Driver tab.
Click the Update Driver button, then follow the instructions.
Very important: You must reboot your system to ensure that any driver updates have taken effect.
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