GUIDE How to Enable Network Adapter on macOS

[Cyberdevs]

For the sake of the simplicity I will refer to the network adapter as LAN in the rest of the article.

These devices can be activated under the macOS by using a specific kind of KEXT and I will show you how to determine which one of these vendors is provided the LAN adapter on your mainboard and which one of the KEXT you need to use.

The best way to determine the exact model of your mainboard’s LAN adapter is the manufacturer’s website.
You can easily use google to search the model of your mainboard and then see the detailed specifications of your mainboard.

There are several major vendors for providing the onboard LAN Adapters.

• Marvell
• Intel
• Realtek
• Atheros

Method 1:
Well now that you know which vendor has provided the chipset for your LAN adapter you can easily use the compatible kext from our Download section and add it to your clover folder:

• Mount the EFI partition on your bootable device and copy the kext inside Clover's /EFI/Clover/kexts/Other folder and reboot.
• After reboot your Network Adapter should be enabled.

Note:
Please note that each of those kext are designed for a specific set of LAN Adapters for instance RTL8100 and RTL8111 are two different chipsets and you can't activate RTL8100 series by using the kext for RTL8111 series and vise versa.
If your mainboard has more than one LAN adapter like my GA-Z170X-Gaming 5 which has one Intel GigaBit Ethernet and one Killer E2200 I need to use IntelMausiEThernet.kext and AtheroeE2200.kext to activate both adapters.


Method 2:
If your LAN adapter is not listed in our download section you might need to add your device ID manually.

Use applications like dpciManager which tells you all about the device IDs for all your devices, find the device ID of the LAN adapter and then you can look it up online and find out who made that chip and which KEXT to use.
As you can see I have three LAN adapters on my mainboard which are shown in the picture below:

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In you take a look at the these columns you can see the fallowing information:
Vendor, Device and the Vendor Name.

Now that you have figured out which LAN adapter is used on your mainboard you can easily look in our download section and find the right kext for your LAN adapter.

Please note that some of the LAN adapters might not be supported by these KEXTs and you might need to add the support for your LAN adapter directly to one the files inside the PlugIns folder inside the IONetworkingFamily.kext.
IONetworkingFamily.kext is placed under /System/Library/Extensions and you need to copy the it to your desktop or somewhere else in order to be able to edit it easier.
Please make sure that you keep a copy of the original KEXT file just in case.

You can use an application called PlistEdit Pro in order to open and edit the info.plist file inside the KEXT files.
Right click on the IONetworkingFamily.kext and navigate to Contents/Plugins/ and finds the corresponding kext file what matches your LAN adapter.
Open the file with PlistEdit Pro and elect the info.plist to edit.

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You can add the device id for your LAN adapter under the IOKitPersonalities by finding the closest relative device and duplicating it an then changing the existing device ID with the device ID for your Adapter.

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Install the KEXT back in the /System/Library/Extensions, rebuild the permission and kexts caches and reboot the computer.
You can find the network related kexts in our download section under the Kexts.



Hopefully after the reboot your LAN adapter should be active now.