I have been searching for an answer to this for the last three hours. I have found many references to the problem, but no solutions. I upgraded one of my servers to a an old P2-233 Dell I had laying around. When Mandrake 8.2 setup tried to install my NIC (Kingston NE2000 compliant card), I got a messsage:

insmod'ing module ne2k-pci failed at /usr/bin/perl-install/modules.pm line 625

Networking was not succesfully installed so I tired to install it manually after install finished. I ran insmod ne2k-pci but got several unresolved symbol errors in the module:

/lib/modules/2.4.18-6mdk/kernel/drivers/net/ne2k-pci.o.gz: unresolved symbol ei_close_R42170ec4
/lib/modules/2.4.18-6mdk/kernel/drivers/net/ne2k-pci.o.gz: unresolved symbol ei_interrupt_Rd93d8fa5
/lib/modules/2.4.18-6mdk/kernel/drivers/net/ne2k-pci.o.gz: unresolved symbol NS8390_init_R2b6bbb48
/lib/modules/2.4.18-6mdk/kernel/drivers/net/ne2k-pci.o.gz: unresolved symbol ei_openR1d9b00ea
/lib/modules/2.4.18-6mdk/kernel/drivers/net/ne2k-pci.o.gz: unresolved symbol eth_dev_init_Rec5564b1e

When I try to insmod 8390 it says the file can't be found even though it is in my /lib/modules/2.4.18-6mdk/kernel/drivers/net folder. I get the same results whether I use insmod or modprobe. Any tips or thoughts? Thanks.

Have you upgraded your Kernel recently. You may need to recompile. I had similar problems. It has been so long ago, I can't really remember what I did.

I finally got it working. I moved some cards around and turned the BIOS to Plug and Play OS, but something did the trick. Everything worked perfectly as soon as I rebooted.

Ya know, now that I think of it, this is kind of what happened to me. After hours of frustration, I just rebooted it one more time, and vuella! It detected my second NIC.