NetBSD bricked my NIC

[Stathis Kamperis <ekamperi%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi people,

I was trying to pxeboot netbsd-GENRIC (version 5.1) in an Asus Eee 901 netbook.

Kernel started up fine, but at some point I got spammed with tons of errors:
'ale0: phy read timeout: phy X, reg Y'

and then:
'no file system for ale0'

I rebooted the machine, but I could no longer use pxeboot and my NIC
didn't show up in BIOS.

Does anyone know:
1. how could I restore my NIC to a working state ?
2. how could I make NetBSD use my NIC properly? According to
http://www.netbsd.org/ports/i386/netbook.html it should already be
supported out of the box.

Stathis