Re: FA511/tulip cardbus card fails (no EEPROM) on reboot from WinXP

In article <slrneqsuni.r53.ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.networking, in
article <tPdrh.403808$Fi1.247207@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bill Brelsford wrote:

Since upgrading my Winbook Si laptop's Windows partition from ME to
XP, my Netgear FA511 card fails under Linux after rebooting from
Windows:

eth0: ADMtek Comet rev 17 at 00011800, EEPROM not present,
00:4C:69:6E:75:7C, IRQ 10.

Hmmm...

[compton ~]$ etherwhois 00:4C:69
Non-existent address as of Dec 18 17:25:59 MST 2006 OUI file
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
004C696E7579 (Linux in hex) Tulip driver can't find EEPROM
[compton ~]$

You may want to google for that MAC address - yes it's a well known
problem, no - I don't remember what the fix is... my notes say:

--------
In c.o.l.n (Message-ID: <1143424641.153132.176950@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
on 3/27/06, a report that the tulip _driver_ chooses 00:4C:69:6E:75:79 (Linux
in hex) as the MAC if it can't see the EEPROM. Article title was "MAC
00:4C:69:6E:75:79" posted from Oz by "sergerivest@xxxxxxxxx"
--------

I found that posting .. interesting that the MAC address in my case
is ...:7C, not ...:79. And, in my case, the card doesn't work.

The only way to recover seems to be to power down the computer.
Restarting PCMCIA, ejecting/re-inserting the card, and rebooting
all have no effect.

What's happening is that windoze is leaving the NIC in a strange state,
and the Linux driver you have doesn't know how to recover from that
state. When you power down, the card and associated interface gets reset
to a known state - and the Linux driver can handle that. The reason a
'reboot' doesn't fix the problem is that it is a software reset, and this
doesn't effect the hardware There is a "wire" in the computer named /RESET
which, when pulled low - yanks the chains on all hardware. This wire is
connected to the "PWR_GOOD" signal out of the power supply (the supply
voltages are above a threshold such that there is enough poop to run the
system). On a _desktop_ type of system, this wire was also connected to
the front panel RESET push button. This wire is NOT effected by a reboot
or even the "three-finger-salute" so beloved by microsoft.

That's about what I thought. Thanks for providing a detailed
explanation.

I'm running Debian (both Sarge and Sid) with homebuilt kernel
2.6.18.

Which driver are you trying to use? There are several that work with
a "tulip" type of card - some better than others.

I'm using the driver that comes with the kernel:

CONFIG_NET_TULIP=y
# CONFIG_DE2104X is not set
CONFIG_TULIP=m
# CONFIG_TULIP_MWI is not set
# CONFIG_TULIP_MMIO is not set
# CONFIG_TULIP_NAPI is not set
# CONFIG_DE4X5 is not set
# CONFIG_WINBOND_840 is not set
# CONFIG_DM9102 is not set
# CONFIG_ULI526X is not set
# CONFIG_PCMCIA_XIRCOM is not set
# CONFIG_PCMCIA_XIRTULIP is not set

Old guy

--
Bill Brelsford
k2di7@xxxxxxx
.