I have a machine with 2 ethernet cards. The CD boots up and the nics work. After the HD install ifconfig only shows lo, and ifup eth1 (or 0) gives me:

Ignoring unknown interface eth1=eth1.

$ dmesg | grep eth

eth0: NatSemi DP8381[56] at 0xe08ea000, 00:02:e3:15:65:7a, IRQ 10.
eth1: VIA 6102 Rhine-II at 0xe0822200, 00:0d:87:5f:73:0e, IRQ 11.
eth1: MII PHY found at address 1, status 0x786d advertising 05e1 Link 0021.
eth1: MII PHY found at address 2, status 0x0000 advertising 0000 Link e000
eth1: MII PHY found at address 3, status 0x0000 advertising 0000 Link e000
eth1: MII PHY found at address 4, status 0x0000 advertising 0000 Link e000

So the kernel sees them, just doesn't bind the driver to them. lsmod shows natsemi and via-rhine as loaded but (unused).

Any clue what the problem is?