No wired (LAN) connection in Linux, although everything looks right

Today I experienced a strange problem with my notebook (Dell Precision M4800) and LAN card (Intel I217-LM, driver e1000e). I connected a LAN cable, but it just would not get a connection. Not via DHCP and network-manager, not via DHCP/dhclient, and not via static ip. On the same notebook, everything worked fine under Windows 8.

Symptoms:

• Wifi worked fine
• No response to “dhclient -i eth0”
• When configuring a static IP in network-manager, it showed “Connection established”, but nothing worked
• Also when configuring a static IP manually (ipconfig eth0 192.168.0.234), no working connection
• “lshw -C network” showed the LAN and Wifi card with their respective drivers
• “lsmod” showed the e1000e driver
• “dmesg” and “tail -n50 /var/log/syslog” showed no abnormal messages relating to networking
• “tcpdump -B 16384 -vv -i eth0” showed the sent DHCPDISCOVER packets and loads of “who-has 192.168.0.1 tell myNotebook” ARP packets, but none from 192.168.0.1 to my notebook
• The router (with pfSense) sometimes seemed to receive the DHCPDISCOVER packets and seemed to make DHCPOFFERs
• Once and only during a reboot, I successfully received an IP address via DHCP, but I still could not connect to anything in the network

More things I tried:

After quite some time, I found the culprit:

Windows 8…

It does, by default, not do a real shutdown anymore and somehow accomplishes to mess with my LAN card. The new, “hybrid” shutdown exists to speed up the Windows boot time. By shutting down Windows 8 with “shutdown -s -t 0”, every problem with my LAN card was suddenly gone.

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