Kevin -
No offence or disrespect intended. Just want to offer my experience when I was getting the same Bringing up interface eth0 [FAILED] message. What I did to find the problem was different than the troubleshooting path you suggest. Please don't hesitate to comment when you see what I suggest...
Chadian22 -
After you boot and see the [FAILED] message, log in as root and bring up a terminal window. Type in dmesg and hit enter.
Look down through the diagnostics until you get to the section about the natsemi driver.
Mine, which is now working, looks like this:
natsemi.c:v1.07 1/9/2001 Written by Donald Becker <becker@scyld.com>
http://www.scyld.com/network/natsemi.html
(unofficial 2.4.x kernel port, version 1.07+LK1.0.14, Nov 27, 2001 Jeff Garzik, Tjeerd Mulder)
divert: allocating divert_blk for eth0
eth0: NatSemi DP8381[56] at 0xcc862000, 00:02:e3:23:63:e3, IRQ 3.
eth0: link up.
Note that it assigned the NetGear card to IRQ3. My original problem was that just before the natsemi section was an error message stating that it could not find the IRQ for pin 9 on the PCI device.
In the BIOS settings, setting the Operating System to "Other" rather than any of the Windows choices completely fixed the problem. Did not have to do anything else since I had configured it for DHCP earlier. The earlier settings just took over and now all is well.
I bring this up because many other people posted messages offering me the same procedure that Kevin graciously describes. None of that worked for me - as long as the card doesn't get an interrupt assigned, no amount of configuration and scripting will help.
This is a good quick and easy check that may help get you on your way.
Yes - I'm posting this on the very machine that had the problem - using Red Hat 8.0 and Mozilla...