How to solve “Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization” error

Today, I encountered with a strange error after I cloned CentOS 6 guest machine in Oracle VirtualBox. After logging in to CentOS guest, my network card is disappeared. I can’t SSH to the CentOS guest anymore. I tried to check the IP address using command:

# ifconfig

Sample output:

 lo Link encap:Local Loopback 
 inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1
 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

eth0 config details doesn’t show up. It only displays the loopback interface details.

I tried to restart the network service to sort out the issue.

# service network restart

Nothing! It simply displayed the following error.

Bringing up interface eth0: Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization

Method 1:

To fix this problem, simply remove the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and reboot your system.

# rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Now, you will see the network card is up.

Method 2:

If the problem is still not solved, open up the eth0 config file:

# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Note down the MAC id (HWADDR). change HWADDR to your VMWare Network Card Mac address

[...]
HWADDR=08:00:27:DC:33:3F
[...]