Ethernet card initialization

[Ross Thompson <ross@whatsis.com>]

Hi,

I have very old hardware that I'm trying to upgrade from RH5.2 to
RH7.2.  ("Upgrade", here, means a ground up install of the 7.2
installation, not the redhat rpm upgrade.)  Everything went very
smoothly except for the ethernet card.  Here is what I know:

The machine has a 20MHz Pentium (with MMX!)
  (Yes. 20MHz.  You read that right.)
32Meg of main memory

By inspection, I learned the following:

--------------------
gatchah: scanpci
card 0x0c function 0 vendor 0x10b7 device 0x9055 3Com device unknown

(And a few other cards.  These others are all logically pci cards, but
physically built onto the motherboard.  The other pci slots are
empty.)

gatchah: grep 9055 /usr/share/kudzu/pcitable
0x10b7  0x9055  "3c59x" "3Com Corporation|3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone]"

gatchah: more /etc/sysconfig/hwconf
....
class NETWORK 
bus PCI
detached 0
device eth
driver: disabled
description: "3Com Corporation|3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone]"
VendorID 0x10b7
deviceId 9055
subVendorID 0x10b7
subdeviceId 9055
pciType: 1

gatchah: cat /proc/interrupts
 .. timer, kbd, cascade, rtc, PS/2 mouse, ide0, ide1, NMI, ERR

gatchah: modprobe -c | grep eth
alias eth0 off
--------------------

(I apologize for the terseness of the above.  The floppy disk drive
doesn't work in this machine, so without the ethernet, there is no way
to get files off it.  So I had to type the above in by hand, which
meant leaving out lots of details that I considered unimportant.)

So, it looks like the software knows about the card, has a driver for
it (which is installed on the machine, by the way) but refuses to
enable it or assign an interrupt for it.  This card used to work just
fine on RH 5.2, and I have another ethernet card (also from 3Com) that
has the exact same symptoms, so I think we can safely eliminate the
card's hardware as being a direct source of the difficulty.

This is the end of my ability to debug this.  Any help would be
greatly appreciated.

Ideally, a solution would not involve downloading any software, as the
machine is cut off from the network and getting more bits onto it
would be a royal pain.

Thanks,
- Ross

---
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness
of the few.				-- Stendhal