Intel e1000e Ethernet not working

I have the problem that the ethernet device on the Intel NUC is not found. ifconfig -a only shows lo and wlan0 but not eth0.

sudo lshw -C net gives the following output:

*-network UNCLAIMED
description: Ethernet controller
product: Ethernet Connection (3) I218-V
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 19
bus info: pci@0000:00:19.0
version: 03
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: cap_list
configuration: latency=0
memory:f7100000-f711ffff memory:f713b000-f713bfff
ioport: f080(size=32) 

After running sudo lshw -C net and dmesg | grep -e eth -e e1000, I get this output:

[ 0.847256] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 2.3.2-k
[ 0.847260] e1000e: Copyright(c) 1999 - 2014 Intel Corporation.
[ 0.863337] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: Interrupt Throttling Rate (ints/sec) set to dynamic conservative mode
[ 1.673743] e1000e: probe of 0000:00:19.0 failed with error -2
[ 4315.170940] e1000e: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel
[ 4315.171534] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 3.2.4.2-NAPI
[ 4315.171536] e1000e: Copyright(c) 1999 - 2015 Intel Corporation.
[ 4315.171711] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: Interrupt Throttling Rate (ints/sec) set to dynamic conservative mode
[ 4315.994262] e1000e: probe of 0000:00:19.0 failed with error -2

Product information (lspci -nnk) is the following:

00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (3) I218-V [8086:15a3] (rev 03) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:2057]

Kernel version is 3.19.0-22. I am booting in UEFI mode. The BIOS version is the latest version.

As suggested, I updated the BIOS to the newest version, Left the device without power for a while and changed the hardware configuration. So far without luck!

I just installed Windows, and the device also isn't working there. This probably means that it's either a BIOS problem, as suggested, or the hardware is actually damaged.

Any further thoughts on this?

For others with similar problems:

In the beginning I thought this was a driver issue. I wanted to install the newest version of the e1000e driver. This requires version 8.x.x of the e1000 driver. When I tried to install this driver, I got the following error message (even though I run kernel version 3.19):

 *** Aborting the build. *** This driver is not supported on kernel versions older than 2.4.0. Stop.

However, it turns out that the old driver on the system was working fine. The real problem has to lay somewhere else.

2 Answers

From the logs it seems to me you have managed to update the driver from version 2.3.2-k to 3.2.4.2-NAPI.

I fixed my Intel NUC non working ethernet by:

• download the driver from , currently 3.2.4.2 (as shown in lshw -C above)
• make install in the src folder
• rmmod e1000e
• modprobe e1000e
• and to make the new driver survive a reboot update-initramfs -u

This I have to repeat at every kernel update, since kernel updates still (3.13.0-63) contain the old driver version 2.3.2-k, which does not work with my Intel NUC.

Written by Eugene Mihailescu: The NVM checksum is not valid

The root of the problem is in the hardware and this page goes through fixing it.

In my case it was as simple as downloading the Linux version of bootutil from Intel and then chmodding and running the 64 bit version with the parameters -NIC=1 -DEFAULTCONFIG. I simply did this from within Ubuntu for minimal effort.