8.1 does not work on P-I motherboard

Hi All, I am trying to get Suse 8.1 to be up and running on a old P-166, now at boot time it complains something of ACPI/APCI. gets installed well and good but does not take a perfectly working 3c59x ethernet adapter and complaints at startup of ifup: Interface name invalid.(I did this posting also..) What is new is that Now the moment i plug this HDD on a new P-III motherboard it works fine, with the same network card..anything I need to enable on this old P-1 motherboard / disable something ? I am refurbishing old PCs with Linux but apparently I cannot proceed further if there is no networking..:-(... Any help is gr8.. (I Tried all the make module etc.etc.. tried a RTL card and a SureCom card also but to fail..) Cheers Vishal ..