Not finding my wireless card on startup

soaked · 07-16-2005, 05:36 AM

My system does not find my Belkin F5D7000 on startup. Can anybody tell me I need to put in modprobe <parameter> to make FC4 look for the card?

I'm a newbie, be gentle please? I was VERY pleased that I was able to build an ndiswrapper for the card, and it appears to have been built properly, but that's not much use when the system doesn't find the card.

Hangdog42 · 07-17-2005, 09:38 AM

It is likely that the ndiswrapper module isn't getting loaded on boot. Have a look at the output of lsmod and if you don't see ndiswrapper in the list, you need to load it with modprobe. Hopefully that will get the card recognized, but with Fedora, who knows.

sonnik · 07-17-2005, 03:32 PM

All you should have to do is a:

Code:

modprobe ndiswrapper

But I've noticed an instance of a strange behavior in FC4. I have to force an eject/insert of the wireless PCMCIA card. This can be done with:

Code:

cardctl eject n
cardctl insert n

Where n is the number of your card's slot (0 or 1). So, you may have to manually...

cardctl eject 1
cardctl insert 1
modprobe ndiswrapper
[set with iwconfig or use wpa_supplicant]
dhclient -q wlan0

...until you figure out the right sequence and parameters that work best for you.

f you find you have to issue a sequence of commands to get it to work, you may wish to create a small shell script to do this and reference it in /etc/rc.d/rc.local

If it still doesn't work, see if you have firmware at /lib/firmware

soaked · 07-18-2005, 05:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Hangdog42
It is likely that the ndiswrapper module isn't getting loaded on boot. Have a look at the output of lsmod and if you don't see ndiswrapper in the list, you need to load it with modprobe. Hopefully that will get the card recognized, but with Fedora, who knows.

No, unfortunately it doesn't get the card recoginised. It loads ndiswrapper but an ndiswrapper -l just says that the driver is installed, but it does not say that the card has been found.

I've watched the whole boot sequence from the back of the PC, the card never has any either of the ethernet status LEDs light up.

The card does not appear when I do an lspci either.

If anybody can help by seeing my system spec in more detail, please take a look at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...16#post1752816

Hangdog42 · 07-19-2005, 07:45 AM

Quote:

The card does not appear when I do an lspci either.

Well, that clears up why the card doesn't work. Until we can figure out how to get the card to show up in lspci, I doubt ndiswrapper is going to see it. You said in the other post that the card works in a different computer, but do you have any indication that it works in this one? You might want to try burning a Knoppix CD and boot with that. If Knoppix can't pick up the card either, that suggests either an improperly seated card (you might want to make sure that the card is in solidly) or maybe a bad pci slot. Can you swap this card into a different pci slot?

soaked · 07-19-2005, 01:32 PM

Thanks for hanging in there dog42 and helping out with this.

If I put my old Soundblaster Live! card in a PCI slot it gets recognised (modprobed) fine, so I know a particular slot and also PCI bus is working. If I put the Wireless card in the same slot, or any other, it just doesn't get found. I've stripped the machine bare so I have only a graphics card in the AGP slot and this wireless card in a PCI slot.

The PC where it was working (under Win XP Home SP2) was a brand new Dell Dimension 5000.

This old one is pre-1999 motherboard. I'm beginning to think that maybe the version of PCI that the card needs is not supported by the motherboard. Is that a possible explanation? The manual for the wireless card doesn't help. It just says that 32-bit PCI is required. The motherboard manual is more precise. It says it supports 32-bit PCI v2.0 and v2.1.

AM1SHFURN1TURE · 07-19-2005, 06:48 PM

I had a problem similar to that but on a debian system: modprobe ndiswrapper seemed to work but ndiswrapper -l showed only that the driver was installed - but no hardware present. I will tell you what I did because it might be of use to you.

I basically did a 'refresh' of everything. (shown here in sequence)
ndiswrapper -e <your driver>
rmmod ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -i <the INF file of your driver in the appropriate location>
depmod -a
modprobe ndiswrapper

You may find this helpful, just thought I would add my two cents in.
Afterwards 'modprobe ndiswrapper' should be able to do the trick, so you can have that in a script somewhere to be automated at boot.

Hangdog42 · 07-21-2005, 08:25 AM

Quote:

This old one is pre-1999 motherboard. I'm beginning to think that maybe the version of PCI that the card needs is not supported by the motherboard. Is that a possible explanation?

I have to admit that my knowledge of PCI is extremely limited. I can't imagine that a PCI card or motherboard wouldn't be backward compatible, but I supose its possible. From what you describe, it certainly does sound like some level of incompatibility between the wireless card and the motherboard. The fact that the sound card works in any PCI slot, but the wireless card doesnt' work in any of them really suggests it isn't a bad PCI slot.

Other than AM1SHFURN1TURE's suggestion, I really don't have any ideas other than getting yourself a different wireless card.