[gentoo-user] (dual) booting windows kills the ethernet device for linux

[Allan Gottlieb <gottlieb@nyu.edu>]

I feel strange writing this since I can hardly believe it.
However, it seems to be quite repeatable.

I have a new dell latitude E6500 that I set up for dual booting:
windows 7 and gentoo linux.

The machine seems to have two "hardware" states determined by whether
windows has been run since power on.

If you power the machine on it goes into what I call State A.
Now if I either select linux from grub or just use the default we get

linux boots and eth0 works
reboot
linux boots and eth0 works
...
reboot
linux boots and eth0 works

but now reboot into windows and we get State B
windows boots and eth0 works
reboot to linux
linux boots but eth0 fails
reboot
linux boots but eth0 fails
...
reboot
linux boots but eth0 fails.

If I then power the machine off instead of simply rebooting
we get back to State A

power on
linux boots and eth0 works
reboot
linux boots and eth0 works

etc.

This is quite repeatable.  I would greatly appreciate an explanation.

thanks,
allan