Wierd Install problem...long explanation.NEED advice

[John Foster]

This is a strange one. I recently built a new box for my main server. I used all of my old drives (4) and simply moved them into the new box. I also used the same edimax (realtek 8139) NIC. I had it running fine. I got a power hit several times and screwed up all of the filesystems including a windows 98se drive. So I decided to flatten all of the drives and reinstall all of the software (doing disk repairs at that time) Everything went well with windows ( which I mainly use for banking) and am currently using to access this list. I then proceeded to reinstall Woody on 2 other drives from floppies that I made. So far So good. Everything seemed to install until I tried to get the network connection running. After it was configured I got a message saying that the network was installed and configured but not operating. I did select the 8139too module to be loaded and it did install. So I installed the rest of the base systems from the mounted windows drive. Still I figured this will work. I ran lilo and rebooted the system. Still no problems. Linux runs...but the network connection is not working. I tried a complete reinstall using Potato disks & the result was the same. I ahve been using this hardware for 5 years with no problems and windows seems to work fine (UGH!!!) I really would appreciate any advice or ideas. I did try installing and using my custom made kernel-image-2.2.19_k7.deb. This is the kernel that was running on both Linux drives before the power surges and it runs fine just no network. lsmod says 8139too 0 unused. I am not a newbie but this one has me stumped. Thanks. John Foster