Question: TP390X, 512MB, and PCMCIA 

Forum: PCMCIA Installation and Configuration Issues
Date: 2000, Feb 02
From: Andrew Newton <lfs@eskimo.com>

I have a ThinkPad 390X (2626-MOU) with Mandrake 7.0. The kernel is 2.2.14 and pcmcia-cs is 3.1.9 (I know 3.1.10 is the latest, but the release notes didn't say anything that looked relevant to my problem). Cardmgr says I have a TI 1251B PCIC. Anyway, cardmgr doesn't recognize any cards and constantly spits out "i82365; infinite loop in interrupt handler". In an effort to fix the problem, I have tried several options in /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia. Currently the PCIC_OPTS read "irq_list=3,7 pci_csc=1 pci_int=1 pci_irq_list=4,5,9,10". But they don't seem to make a difference at all. I do have two workarounds. The first is to boot into Win98 first. It does recognize the PCMCIA cards. Then I tell Win98 to reboot and have LILO boot Linux. Now the cardmgr has no problems. The second workaround is based on the following link I found on IBM's web site with CardWizard under Windows (ftp://ftp.pc.ibm.com/pub/pccbbs/mobiles/pctpitfix.txt). Basically, there seems to be some sort of hardware problem with ThinkPad 390X,600E, and 600X and 512MB of memory. So I put "mem=64m" on the append line in lilo and rebooted. No dice. Then I took out one of the 256MB DIMMS giving the sytem just 256MB and rebooted. IT WORKED! Any ideas?

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It's a flaky BIOS problem Re: Question: TP390X, 512MB, and PCMCIA (Andrew Newton) Date: 2000, Feb 09 From: David Hinds <dhinds@pcmcia.sourceforge.org>

I know what's wrong. The ThinkPad BIOS configures the CardBus bridge at address 0x10000000 regardless of how much memory is installed. This address happens to equal 256MB, so if you've got 512MB installed, the bridge is configured to sit in the middle of your system memory. Get the latest (09-Feb-00) beta PCMCIA package from sourceforge.org in /pcmcia/NEW, and set: CORE_OPTS="cb_mem_base=0x20000000" in /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia and it should work with 512MB installed. -- Dave

Sad: same problem, fixed, but now xircom card wont work Re: It's a flaky BIOS problem (David Hinds) Date: 2000, May 25 From: Dan Trevino dantrevino

I had the same problem, same configuration TP390X 2626MOU, w/512MB RAM. Found this fix, and it works great. No more "infinite loop...." messages, apm problems, etc..But, if I make this change, my xircom card no longer works. Commenting out the line and restarting pcmcia enables my card, but I get the same problems (obviously)....any ideas?

That doesn't make much sense Re: Sad: same problem, fixed, but now xircom card wont work (Dan Trevino) Date: 2000, May 25 From: David Hinds <dhinds@pcmcia.sourceforge.org>

I'm not sure I understand. If you had the original problem, your system should have barely been functional, but you say your Xircom card worked?? You should include much more detail. What Xircom card is this, and what are your system log messages in the good and bad configurations? Also you say that just commenting out the fix and restarting PCMCIA makes your card work. That shouldn't be possible: commenting out that line should have no effect until you do a cold boot. Maybe just restarting PCMCIA is what "fixed" things? -- Dave

Idea: Actually you only did part of the fix Re: Sad: same problem, fixed, but now xircom card wont work (Dan Trevino) Date: 2000, May 25 From: David Hinds <dhinds@pcmcia.sourceforge.org>

You added the startup parameter... but you missed the part about upgrading your PCMCIA drivers. The cb_mem_base parameter is not available in your 3.1.8 PCMCIA drivers. It will work better if you upgrade (3.1.15 is current) -- Dave

Ok: fixed Re: Idea: Actually you only did part of the fix (David Hinds) Date: 2000, May 25 From: Dan Trevino dantrevino

I'm a bonehead...everything works great! thanks

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