Any Network Engineers can help please ?

I don’t know if any network engineers can help me – I have reached out to a couple of professional firms but they haven’t got back to me.

I have a fairly complex (for domestic) home network, consisting of a Draytek modem (still waiting for FTTP) and Draytek 2927 Router & several network switches.

The house is spread over 4 floors and we have ended up with Cat Cable and a switch on each floor. These are currently all unmanaged Netgear switches.

The problem I seem to be having is the Network Switch on the middle floor "locks up". When I use my laptop to check connectivity, using ping and speedtest data is coming out of the "supply" cable, but not the switch. The NIC gets a random IP address. Connecting to another switch it gets the correct IP address. Rebooting the switch doesn’t work, swapping the switch out also had the same issue, I ran a new cable to connect directly to the main switch and then it seemed to all work, but this morning it was out again. When I tested this morning the laptop was getting an IP address (in the correct range) but coould only ping something directly connected to that switch & not the router that gave it an IP address.

I think there must be some sort of conflict messing up the network in some form – possibly when something connects to the router is giving out a used IP or the cabling has an issue maybe.

The network switches are all unmanaged and pretty new and all Netgear, the router has also recently been swapped out by Draytek. All the cables have been tested with a tester (fairly basic checks continuity really although also length & I have re-done the plugs on both ends of the cable that supplies the "troublesome" switch.

My real question – apart from any troubleshooting advice is how should the NW be configured to support multiple switches ? They all say they have MDIX, and don’t have uplink ports, cable used is wired regularly not cross-over.

Would the switches be best all connected to one main switch, and that connected to the router, each switch connected directly to the router, or switches – switches – switches and it doesn’t matter ?

I think I need to get that right first and see what happens ?

Thanks in advance for any advice – I will draw a picture and post it a bit later in case it helps.