I posted this same message in the Networking forum too, because I didn't see this one:

Greetings. This is my first time experimenting on my own with Linux (installing it and setting it up), and I seem to be having problems figuring out how to get it to recognize that I do in fact have a network card installed in the machine.

I have my machine set up in sort of a retarded manner because I'm not familiar with partitioning the drives, and implementing a dual boot system, so what I did is left my one drive with Windows XP on it, and I installed Red Hat on a seperate drive. When I need to use either one, I just turn the computer off and swap the IDE ribbon between drives. Now, obviously my card is working here in XP because I'm typing this message.

I'm using a Earthlink speed stream dsl modem, with a netgear fs105 ethernet switch and a netgear fa311 NIC. When I boot into the Linux drive, it fails bringing up the interface eth0 and interface ppp0, and says it fails in determining my IP info. I'm pretty sure that I don't have a static IP address, because in the past, I have had to update my IP address for people using my FTP server. I was going to try getting that Roaring Penguin PPPOE program, but I am having issues copying into onto disk from my Windows drive and getting it onto the Linux drive. But before I can even tackle that problem, when I ifconfig eth0, I don't get anything. Basically it says it doesn't work.

I read through some other similar posts of this nature, but since I am extremely ignorant at this point in time, I was hoping someone would possess the kindness to give me a helping hand. Thanks.

As a further aside that I forgot to mention in the post in the NW forum, I read a post that someone linked this site:

Well I just found out I can't post URLs yet since I just joined, but it's a reference to the Network administration tool.

I found that program while I was tinkering around and it only has the eth0 listed as inactive, and when i tried to activate it, I got similar messages as before... namely it's telling me I'm S.O.L.

iceolate,

I know this is not quite the thing you asked about, but did you install a bootloader (e.g. LILO, or GRUB)?
If you did/do you wouldn't have to manually swap you IDE-cable, but could select the os you'd like to boot from a menu.

I believe it installed Grub, because I remember it asking me if I wanted
to set up a password for it, but I didn't set one.

Here you can find documentation on how to configure GRUB for dual-boot'n with XP..

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/