dhcp broadcast fails when hdds aren't connected?

In an attempt to cut the scream of my hdds, I tried disconnecting both ribbon cable and power cable from my hdds and booting with only cd-rom drives and Knoppix 3.3-2-19. Everything is detected without a problem, but ifconfig only shows the loopback info and netcardconfig fails the DHCP broadcast. lsmod has a zero to the right of the 3c59x module, which I assume means the module is unused.

Curiously, when I do nothing other than reconnect the ribbon cable and power cord to the hdd and boot back into Knoppix, lsmod shows a one where that zero was and ifconfig shows a successfully configured eth0 at int7. I'm a n00b, so I'm not sure what other info you need. Any ideas?

Thanks very much in advance.