SIOCSIFADDR No such device eth0 error while getting interface flags - eth0 Ethernet Device can

I got this after copying a VMWare image onto another machine in Debian.

SIOCSIFADDR No such device eth0 error while getting interface flags

The solution

1.) Find and edit the device line in persisent-net.rules note it will be prefixed with something like z25 or something else.

vi /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

The easiest way is to comment anything out.

If you are feeling lazy you can just reboot your computer and everything should come back.  If you don't want to reboot follow steps 2 & 3 below.

2.) Now restart udev /etc/init.d/udev restart

3.) Reload the Module.  I found the name is pcnet32

So in my case you unload the module like this: modprobe -r pcnet32

Now reload the module: modprobe pcnet32

Now if you do: ifup eth0 everything should be fine.

If the above doesn't work. 

I copied the same VM again and got the same error, I tried commenting out those lines and rebooting and it wouldn't work.  I tried deleting all lines and there was no luck.  Later on I noticed that another line was adding my device at "eth3". I changed that reference to eth0 but still could not bring it up.

The solution was to just delete this file: z25_persistent-net.rules


After a reboot my ethernet card was working again.  This is a really annoying feature of Debian and UDEV.