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Question: Help with an Ricoh ISA-to-PCMCIA bridge card 

Forum: PCMCIA Installation and Configuration Issues
Date: 1999, Dec 31
From: Jin Yang jyang

Hi, Happy New Year!

It drives me nuts trying to get a WebGear Aviator2.4 Wireless card to work with my Pentium 60MHz Linux desktop through an ISA-to-PCMCIA adapter Webgear provides.

The machine recognizes the adapter during booting but fails to recognizes any PCMCIA card plugged in. It always identifies the card as "anonymous memory". Here is detailed information: 

  o The linux kernel is 2.0.35.

  o The adapter card is recognized as:

     Ricoh RF5C296/396 ISA-to-PCMCIA at port 0x3e0 ofs 0x00, 1 socket
       host opts [0]: none
       ISA irqs (scanned) = 3,7,11,14,15 status cha

  o I've tried two different PCMCIA releases without success.

    When I tried "cardctl ident":

    - release 3.0.14 reports no product information available.
    - release 3.0.4 reports the weired manfid (I forgot exactly what it is,
      something like 0x2010 0x1000) for all types of PCMCIA cards that I
      have.

  o I've tried many different memory and io port settings without success.

This adapter works fine on another Linux desktop which is Pentium 133 MMX.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks a million!

- Jin

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Idea: Re: Help with an Ricoh ISA-to-PCMCIA bridge card

Re: Question: Help with an Ricoh ISA-to-PCMCIA bridge card (Jin Yang)
Date: 2000, Jan 14
From: Ovidiu Predescu ovidiu

Hi,

I had the same problem as you have: everything worked fine when I plugged the WebGear card into a cheap AMD computer that had all the devices (video, audio, ethernet) on board, but failed to work when I moved the card into a more expensive computer with all these devices as external PCI cards.

I scratched my head for about 1 week, installing various kernels, playing with various PCMCIA versions, until I realized that something must be wrong with the interrupts. I took a look at the laptop I'm using as the other wireless computer to see what interrupt the WebGear card uses and observed a difference. The laptop is using irq 3 while the new computer was using irq 9. So I went ahead and I disabled the onboard serial port 2 in BIOS which was using irq 3. Voila, the whole thing started to work again!

BTW, it may help to try disable all the unused controllers that eat up irqs, as it appears that disabling only COM2 somehow doesn't solve the problem.

I hope this helps.

Good luck, Ovidiu

Help with an Ricoh ISA-to-PCMCIA bridge card

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