[El Gran Salseron]

There are motherboard drivers that have to be installed, not only the network adapter drivers.

If the network adapter was working before the hd crash then it is already enabled in BIOS but you have to install the motherboard drivers.

Surely, there must be a set of drivers for the motherboard that came with the computer.

On the other hand, maybe the network adapter is listed in device manager as a yellow "?" ( Unknown ) device and that is where the drivers would have to be installed.

[Prophet in the wilderness]

I wonder if the disks themselves could have a defect or scratch in it ?
When Windows does a restore of the disk, it ( HAS TO ) go through it with no problems ( because the CPU does the calculations from the disk - and there can't be no errors while restoring the computer ).
I just did a restore from my disk, and I kept getting a error message , and kept trying it to no avail, until I looked at the disk and found scratches and finger marks, the disks have to be clean to work properly.