I’ve been fiddling around with my Pavilion dv6748us recently, and one of the times I disassembled it, I seem to have done something to the LAN circuitry, because now I get a message that says:
[ 2.059606] forcedeth 0000:00:0a.0: Invalid MAC address detected: 00:00:00:00:00:00 - Please complain to your hardware vendor.
[ 2.059630] forcedeth 0000:00:0a.0: Using random MAC address: fe:5b:67:1e:94:57
This appears every time I boot on Linux. On Windows it just shows up in the device manager as an unknown device.
I can also verify that the mac address is all zeros, since after experiencing it I flashed an “unlocked” bios which adds more options to the standard bios menu, and I can see a “LAN MAC ADDRESS: 000000000000”. I’ve tried to disable the peripheral and enabling it again to see if it would recover the address, but it didn’t.
At least on Linux, LAN still works perfectly fine, but I would still like to know if there is any way of getting any MAC address to be re-written. I don’t care if its the original or not
