On 9/3/06, William L. Maltby CentOS4Bill@triad.rr.com wrote:
On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 21:49 -0500, Paul wrote:
On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 10:35 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 11:00 -0400, Jerry Geis wrote:
<snip>
I think the issue is with the Realtek RTL8211 Gigabit Ethernet controller that the board uses and not the nVidia chipset.
A quick solution might be to find any 10/100 NIC and see if that works instead. I looked and did not find what module to load for the RTL-8211 chip.
Knowing how the various releases of chips are often so common in a family, maybe it matches the RTL 8169/8110s on a NIC card in one of my machines? The driver loaded for that is r8169. Give it a try after boot. If it works, you can pop it into your initrd, update init or configs and make a new initrd.
Just an FYI. I have an MCP51 board (Gateway GT4016), and the NIC works just fine on CentOS 4.3/4.4.
The only hitch is that the forcedeth driver has a major bug for dual-boot users. Running the NIC from Windows leaves the card in a state that the forcedeth driver cannot handle after a warm reboot. You have to unplug the box from power to reset the card. I don't know when and if the upstream provider will backport the latest forcedeth patches to correct the problem.
This is not a Red Hat / CentOS problem - the most common versions of forcedeth have thesame failing on any distro.