When is a CardBus port not one?
Discussion
I've got a somewhat ancient IBM ThinkPad 240 sub-notebook which was given to us recently and I intend to turn into a wireless web browser.
So off I go to www.novatech.co.uk and select a 802.11g Wireless Access Point and a 802.11g PCMCIA network card. Specifically chose one that was PCMCIA rather than CardBus, although research on the ThinkPad did show that it's PCMCIA slot was CardBus compatible.
The WAP and card arrived yesterday, so I set it all up, installed the drivers in the laptop and popped the card in.
A message box popped up saying "The device 'Texas Instruments PCI-1211 CardBus Controller' has detected a CardBus card in its slot, but the firmware on this system is not configured to allow the CardBus controller to be run in CardBus mode."
So it would seem that the PCMCIA card I bought is actually a CardBus card after all, that my research was correct that the laptop has a CardBus port, but they don't want to work together.
A trawl through the Microsoft Knowledge Base gives a similar error message but for a PCI-1130 (see here and says that "Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional".
Ok, fair enough, I'll trash Win2k on the laptop and install WinXP Pro on it.
Completed the installation at about 12:45am this morning, installed the PCMCIA drivers, put the card in, and I get the same bloody error message.
Has anyone got any suggestions (apart from giving up and throwing the laptop in the bin, that is).
So off I go to www.novatech.co.uk and select a 802.11g Wireless Access Point and a 802.11g PCMCIA network card. Specifically chose one that was PCMCIA rather than CardBus, although research on the ThinkPad did show that it's PCMCIA slot was CardBus compatible.
The WAP and card arrived yesterday, so I set it all up, installed the drivers in the laptop and popped the card in.
A message box popped up saying "The device 'Texas Instruments PCI-1211 CardBus Controller' has detected a CardBus card in its slot, but the firmware on this system is not configured to allow the CardBus controller to be run in CardBus mode."
So it would seem that the PCMCIA card I bought is actually a CardBus card after all, that my research was correct that the laptop has a CardBus port, but they don't want to work together.
A trawl through the Microsoft Knowledge Base gives a similar error message but for a PCI-1130 (see here and says that "Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional".
Ok, fair enough, I'll trash Win2k on the laptop and install WinXP Pro on it.
Completed the installation at about 12:45am this morning, installed the PCMCIA drivers, put the card in, and I get the same bloody error message.
Has anyone got any suggestions (apart from giving up and throwing the laptop in the bin, that is).
Andrew Noakes said:
I think, though I'm not certain, that all 802.11g cards are CardBus. I use an old Apple Powerbook with the same problem - the card slot works with 16-bit PC cards, but not CardBus cards, and I've got an 802.11b wireless card.
Confirmed. I've never seen a G non-CardBus radio.
If you really need to use G (to avoid mixed radio types and slowdowns) can you go USB?
Plotloss said:
Linux?
That's an idea. Mind you, things are complicated by the fact that the CD-ROM drive is external and non-bootable and connects via a PCMCIA card. Could make getting Linux on there a bit difficult. At least it has a bootable (external) floppy, so provided Linux can generate a boot disk it might work. I had wanted to stay with Windows so I could install the odd app on it though.
ThatPhilBrettGuy said:The laptop only has USB 1.1 so would be bottlenecked to 11Mbps anyway.
If you really need to use G (to avoid mixed radio types and slowdowns) can you go USB?
I don't need to use G, to be honest, as our main laptop (a Sony VAIO) has inbuilt B.
I guess I'm going to either have to get a refund on the G card and get a B, or else put the G in the VAIO (and disable its inbuilt B) and buy a 16-bit PCMCIA B card for the ThinkPad.
What an arse.
JonRB said:
Linux?
I had wanted to stay with Windows so I could install the odd app on it though.
Well if you do get it working let me know as I am in exactly the same position!!
Damned PCM CD Roms...
Plotloss said:Matt - what I did to get Win2k onto the laptop was a bit involved, but worked. I don't know if it would work for Linux though.
That's an idea. Mind you, things are complicated by the fact that the CD-ROM drive is external and non-bootable and connects via a PCMCIA card.
I generated the boot floppies for Win2k and booted from them. During the boot-up process, Win2k loaded drivers for the PCMCIA CD-ROM and it started working. However, it then reported that it could not install Win2k from it.
Back to the drawing board. So I copied the contents of the install CD to an external USB HDD (you could use the target machine's internal HDD if there is sufficient space or partitions. I wanted to repartition the whole HDD which is why I used an external HDD).
I then restarted the install with the boot floppies and then when it asked for the install CD I pointed it to the external HDD instead. Installation then proceeded normally.
As I said, I don't know if this would work for Linux, but it worked for Win2k (and by inference, would work for WinXP too).
JonRB said:
Can't you just build the boot kernel again with the driver in it? Or is the problem you don't have a driver full stop?
I think it's more to do with the PCMCIA CD-ROM drive being non-bootable.
Ah, righty. Being slow tonight, sorry.
It's obviously a good time to start putting my dual Opteron server together....now where's that hammer.
Plotloss said:
things are complicated by the fact that the CD-ROM drive is external and non-bootable and connects via a PCMCIA card. Could make getting Linux on there a bit difficult. At least it has a bootable (external) floppy, so provided Linux can generate a boot disk it might work.
Well if you do get it working let me know as I am in exactly the same position!!
For future reference, I have found a way.
I went to the IBM website and downloaded DOS drivers for the port and the CD-ROM drive. They had them all rolled up into a DOS recovery disk, which was a bonus.
I then booted off this, did an FDISK on the HDD and formatted it as a bootable drive, then ran the Win2k installation directly from the CD (by running winnt.exe, which is a DOS application, from the i386 directory) and the install proceeded as normal.
I would imagine a Linux install would follow along similar lines.
And as for the original issue about the CardBus port, I've installed a BIOS firmware update which purports to fix it, although I haven't veried that yet as of yet as I'm still finishing off the install of Win2k as I type.
>> Edited by JonRB on Sunday 17th October 19:51
GreenV8S said:
Is the difference between 11b and 11g important to you?
Not important at all, apart from the fact that I bought an 11g CardBus card for a machine that claims to have a CardBus port and it offends my geek nature that it doesn't do what it says it does and naturally I want to try bludgeon it into submission rather than giving up immediately.
If I fail to get it to work then Novatech have said they're happy for me to return it for replacement (if faulty) or full refund (if not).
However, since IBM have issued a firmware update that claims to fix it, I'll see if that works first.
>> Edited by JonRB on Sunday 17th October 20:43
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