Is the Ethernet wire good?
If the wire is good, you may want to try cloning the MAC address from your laptop to the router. With your laptop connected to the modem:
- Open a command prompt: click the Start button and enter cmd, then hit Enter.
- Enter “ipconfig /all” (without quotes) into the command window.
- Find the Ethernet Adapter section and copy the MAC address (Physical Address) of the adapter.
- Power up the pcWRT router, do not connect to the modem yet.
- Connect your laptop to the pcWRT router, open the management console.
- Go to the Internet Settings page, paste the MAC address of your laptop into the “Override MAC address” field. You’ll need to change the dash (-) to a colon (:) in the MAC address.
- Click Save at the bottom of the page.
- Connect the pcWRT router to the modem.
- Check the Status page again. Does the router get an Internet IP address?
If the above does not work, do you have another router? If so, just for testing purposes, connect the other router to the modem, then connect the pcWRT WAN port to a LAN port on the other router. Check the pcWRT Status page again. Does it have an IP address in the Internet section?