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I have a Retina MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion and Boot Camp with Windows 7 and the Boot Camp 4.0 drivers. I'm also using the Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter.

My problem is that my ethernet port (aka wired connection) is not available in Windows' Control Panel > Network & Internet > Network Connections. Only Bluetooth and Wireless are available. When I try to set up a connection, the only options are wireless and Broadband (PPPoE).

Do I need to download a specific driver to get ethernet working?

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  • I know this is an inconvenient suggestion, but I think the rMBP is more than capable of perfectly running windows in a VM, which would allow you to pass ethernet over (and have OS X take care of the drivers)
    – Alexander
    Aug 28, 2012 at 20:12

2 Answers 2

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First of all, connect the adapter and reboot. In many cases, it will solve the problem. You need to reboot because the adapter is not hot-pluggable. For the same reason, if you remove and re-insert the adapter, it won't work until you reboot.

If you still have difficulties, I've found driver information while looking at the Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter page at Apple Store.

Google "broadcom driver windows netxtreme". Select the netxtreme I Desktop/Mobile driver. Install via device manager (select location where you unzipped driver). Note, the PCI ID for this device 14e4:1682 is not listed in Broadcom's web page list of supported IDs. However the driver's .inf does include the requisite matching for the new device ID.

Hopefully, you can solve this with a reboot due to it not working as a hot-plug device, and each time you need to boot Windows with the adapter attached for the driver to load.

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    Didn't know it wasn't hot-plug - rebooting with the ethernet connected did the trick. Thanks.
    – Ryan
    Aug 28, 2012 at 20:17
  • @ryan - Are you saying that you didn't need any additional drivers other than the normal BootCamp process?
    – bmike ♦
    Aug 28, 2012 at 21:53
  • @bmike Yes, that's correct. I already installed the Boot Camp 4.0 drivers. I tried connecting the ethernet cable after booting and it didn't work. Rebooting with it connected solved the problem.
    – Ryan
    Aug 29, 2012 at 1:28
  • bootcamp, no extra Drivers required, although a Monitor can be plugged into the thunderbolt after starting, Ethernet cant. With the Adapter plugged in a power up, all worked.
    – phil soady
    Jan 20, 2015 at 15:17
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Given the correct answer from iskra, here is a workaround I finally came to: set up Parallels Desktop (yes, it's not free) and use Thunderbolt for Bootcamp when Windows is run under Parallels. As long as network connection is set up in Parallels as Shared, effectively it makes Thunderbolt adapter hot-unpluggable for Bootcamp even within a single boot session. Parallels gives only a fraction of memory (normally not more than a half or 2GB) and only part of CPU power, but in some scenarios that's I can live with.

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