Hardware :: Unable To Get NIC To Initialize In CentOS 5

I have been beating my head against a wall with this for more than an hour.... I purchased a new Ethernet Card to bump up the other side of my network from 10/100 to Gigabit. I previously had a 3c905c 3com card in there before. the chipset I purchased was a realtek 8169 Gigabit..... I removed the old card and put the new one in. Then I ran netconfig but realized that it was holding onto eth0 with 3com's MAC address, so I went and removed the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file. did a service network restart no eth0 trying to start - perfect... I reran netconfig and configured eth0 with all it settings "Netconfig Did recognise the Realtek 8169"

I saw device not initalized when doing an ifup eth0 So I lsmod and saw the 3com module still running - removed the module rmmod 3com - and checked for 8169 - not running... modprobe 8169 and then checked.. bingo its running... service network restart - same error r8169 device eth0 does not seem to be present... delaying initialization. ok - eff it - ill reboot It came up same thing - did not expect it to change... checked /etc/modprobe.conf - i see its aliased... Verified all things are running... I really don't know where to turn... Im sure I could just call it eth2 but then im going to be rewriting all my iptables "firewall rules" and im trying to avoid that.... ** yes I know I could just use sed to replace all eth0 with eth2 ** but then im not learning why and what i am missing...

heres my output

Code:

[root@router etc]# cat /etc/modprobe.conf |grep 8169 && lspci |grep 8169 && lsmod |grep 8169 && cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
alias eth0 r8169

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