I'm new to the Linux world and am having a NIC detection problem with Fedora Core 2. I have two NIC cards in the box, one on the motherboard (which is detected) and on PCI NIC (not detected). typing lspci -v seems to show the PCI NIC, but that is far as I can get with detecting, configuring, etc.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Open up your BIOS and disable the onboard NIC. Most mobos that have onboard gear give you the option to disable it so you can use your own cards. Check your BIOS settings.

If you can figure out what driver your card should use the at the command line try....for example

then use your lspci command

Ok this was the same problem which i had faced long ago and one of my friend helped me out
This is probably because the chipset of your nic is same to the other on also.Because i heard that linux will not load the driver for the same device twice.But in the case of installation it will.But after postinstall probably not.I am assuming that you have realtek chipset in the nic.you can verify by
#cat /etc/modules.conf
it will be something like the following
alias eth0 8139too
alias eth1 8139cp
the device eth0 is taking 8139too.that means linux loaded the driver for eth0 first.then only to eth1,which is taking 8139cp.For this i did the following.

#cd /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/net
#cp 8139too.o 8139cp.o
#depmod
#reboot

if it has a via chip you can find that module at the above location that is
via-rhine.o

The problem could be beacuse of the mis-configuration of /etc/modules.conf. if you see a line something like pre-remove eth1/0 ..... Then remove it.

Good Luck

O.K. Thanks for the replies, but the solutions have not seemed to work.

First, turning off the onboard NIC did not help with the detection of the PCI NIC.

Second, looking at /etc/modprobe.conf revealed only the eth0 alias, which is detected.

Finally, as for the modprobe suggestion, I don't know what driver should be used. The lspci command reveals it to be a (gulp!) Microsoft MN-130 NIC. (This could be the problem.)

Any furhter help (including throw the NIC away and get a non-Microsoft one) would be greatly appreciated.

Ok first see if the network card was detected by linux at some stage or other

This can be done by checking
/etc/sysconfig/hwconf

See if the file has two NETWORK entries

and if it has check if any entry has
detached: 1
[if detached is 1 ] Try pulling out the card and connecting it back again.

or if it has a valid driver
something like

driver: 8139too

Also try running kudzu if you had kudzu disabled on startup

Cheers
Zulfi

BTW, FYI...:

rulex, I have 4 identical 3Com PCI SLOT (internal) NICs in one particular computer, works *fine*.

just in case someone needs this info......

I'd try a live CD such as knoppix and see if it autodetects the card. If it does, I'd check to see which module (driver) it choose to use. Assuming the CD has a 2.6 kernel (recent knoppix, for example), try the following command:

ls /sys/class/net/eth*/driver -l

My system, for example, gives:

gd2shoe@linux:~> ls /sys/class/net/eth*/driver -lh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2005-06-11 22:18 /sys/class/net/eth0/driver -> ../../../bus/pci/drivers/8139too

Where my network card uses the 8139too module. If both cards are detected and properly loaded, there will be two entries (one for each card).