Network Device not working after cloning RHEL6 VM (Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization)

In this post I will give solution to one problem I faced while cloning RHEL6 virtual machine.

ISSUE: I have installed RHEL6.2 on KVM/VMware workstation/Oracle VirtualBox. After installation I have cloned the virtual machine. And when starting cloned virtual machine I get below error while restarting the network service.

Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization

I have also removed HWADDR entry from “/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0”, but still I am getting the same error.

SOLUTION: To resolve this problem follow below mentioned steps:

1. As mentioned above, remove HWADDR entry form “/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0”.

2. Take backup of file “/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules” and remove all reference to eth0.

Ex.

[root@squid2 ~]# cp /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules /root/
[root@squid2 ~]# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

# This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
# program, run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single
# line, and change only the value of the NAME= key.

# PCI device 0x8086:0x100e (e1000)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="08:00:27:08:fa:85", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x8086:0x100e (e1000)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="08:00:27:b7:08:97", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

Entry for PCI device marked with green color is the entry for Ethernet card.

3. Remove the marked entry for both PCI devices from the file “/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules”.

4. Restart the server.

After restart, you will be able to get IP information for the Ethernet card.

If you have any questions please comment.