[CentOS] CentOS 6: ethernet "ifconfig up" failure

On my CentOS 6 partition of my laptop:

First note that for this test, NetworkManager is not running because I did: chkconfig --del NetworkManager and then rebooted.

Here is my ifcfg-eth0:

DEVICE="eth0" NM_CONTROLLED="no" ONBOOT=no HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx TYPE=Ethernet BOOTPROTO=none IPADDR=192.168.2.5 PREFIX=24 GATEWAY=192.168.2.1 DNS1=192.168.2.1 DNS2=192.168.2.1 DEFROUTE=yes IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=yes IPV6INIT=no NAME="System eth0" UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

I reboot to level3, do startx (to KDE 4) then do: # ifconfig eth0 up # ping 192.168.9.1 connect: Network is unreachable

If I edit ifcfg-eth0 to set ONBOOT=yes and reboot, I get a proper connection.

So why is "ifconfig eth0 up" not connecting?

Thanks for your help. Mike.