shutting down interface eth0: system hangs
 

hello world,
i switched my hdd from an intel machine to an athlon machine, on bootup linux detected all the new hardware in the athlon machine and configured it, somehow it could not configure the network card.
the n/w card in the old machine was a 3com and the one in the new one is a netgear. earlier the system would lock up at the sendmail startup, i checked the loopback addr. and it seemed fine, so i had to disable sendmail at startup. i disabled this by renaming sendmail bcoz i could not find the proper init script which disabled sendmail. I am using redhat 9 and i couldn't find any of the standard named files in the rc directory.
now the problem is my machine does not shut down properly, it just hangs at "shutting down interface eth0: "
can anybody help? is it because i have disabled sendmail in an incorrect manner?
any help appreciated.
cheers,
anup.

What can happen with a hardware upgrade/change is that old modules can be loaded and can interfere with detection, as may be the case with the 3com module. It can partly initialise the NIC...

I suggest you remove the card (if you can) and let kudzu detect there is no card present. It will alter the configuration in /etc/sysconfig/hwconf and remove the 3com module from loading.
Then add the card again and let kudzu redetect it.

If the card is onboard, disable it in BIOS.

If these are unsuccessful, remove the reference to Network cards from /etc/sysconfig/hwconf, then remove any "alias eth~ = " kernel modules from the /etc/modules.conf file and re-run kudzu.