Pretty much when you posted that, I found this in my dmesg:
<span style="color:#323232;">[ 715.744332] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6: Interrupt Throttling Rate (ints/sec) set to dynamic conservative mode
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[ 715.965683] e1000e 0000:00:1f.6: The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[ 716.008541] e1000e: probe of 0000:00:1f.6 failed with error -5
</span>
Just for the record, I compared modinfo up against lspci, and the PCI ID matches, so the driver should work. Is it possible to ignore the NVM checksum and try anyway? Because any tool I can find that communicates with the EEPROM on a hardware level is made for msdos.