Windows 7: network adapter missing from device manager

my power flickered off and on really quick and when my pc came back up, the internet would not work. after investigating i found out that the network adapter is missing from the device manager. i have tried to re-download drivers for my network adapter/mobo and this has not solved my problem. i have also set my pc back to a date in the past and it didnt work either. i do not know what else it could be other than my on board network card is faulty. ty.

It sounds like the power problem tweaked your board a bit.

Have you tried clearing the cmos on the board?

Make sure you write down all the important bios settings before you clear the cmos and put them back to how it was before. If you built your own machine this should be fairly easy for you.

If all else fails, add a PCI or PCI-E Network card. That should fix the problem.

Before doing that though, open a Elevated Command Prompt.
Type set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 and press Enter.
Type devmgmt.msc and press Enter to open Device Manager.
Click on View then Show Hidden Devices.
Scroll down and see if Network Adapter is present now or if an Unknown Device shows up. Which ever it is, right click on it and select Uninstall. Reboot and see if Win 7 redetects the device and reloads the driver for it.

I'm having a similar problem. I uninstalled the device and I'm curious about something. If Windows does not install it after restart it means the device is toast?

Not always, clearing the cmos is the first course of action in this case. All it takes is one little overload and the board will disable the device to protect the board. Clearing the cmos tends to fix this sort of problem.
How To Clear CMOS (Reset BIOS)

Thanks for your reply. I uninstalled the LAN card and Windows did not reinstall the driver. Since the led is on something tells me the card is not toasted but I avoided to clear the CMOS since I had lots of problems with something similar on an identical motherboard and I ended up with both motherboard & video card toast but I guess I'll have to do it anyway.