[solved] sky2 fails to connect after hardware upgrade

[haarp]

Hello.
I got a problem with my wired onboard Ethernet. I was previously using an Nvidia nForce (forcedeth) LAN onboard as a DHCP client with a Tomato Router. I recently upgraded to a newer board (Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro) which uses a Marvell Gigabit Ethernet controller.
I disabled 10/100mbit interfaces in the kernel and used the sky2 driver under 1000mbit, which is the correct one. Compiles fine, modprobes fine.
The problem is: The card can't connect. I don't get a lease on DHCP and a static setup results in "network unreachable". Listening on the interface with Wireshark, I can see the router talking. No connections seem to get through tho. No suspicious logs either.
I noticed the same problem when I booted a 2008.0 Gentoo minimal install CD.

When I boot my Fedora Live-USBstick ( 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ), I can get the network interface to work flawlessly (network-manager handles NICs here). So I assume that it must be some broken driver, missing kernel option or that network-manager has magical powers. No idea what to search for tho...

My Gentoo system:
2.6.28-gentoo-r5
lspci -k:

[krinn]

most asus m/b come with 2 ncis now, could it be that use plug the cable on the wrong one? i mean eth0 assign to card 1 and eth1 assign to card 2 and the cable is plug on card 2, so anything you try in eth0 is a dead end

also, hal can do that too on hardware change because it save a file 99network-persistant.hal (or close to that name) where it save that eth0 is your previous network card and so assign eth1 to the new one preventing eth0 usage.

that's ideas you could check.