Hi,

I'm running Fedora 8 x86_64 on a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200 laptop (no hardware added or removed since it was bought, new). It has an Atheros AR5007EG wireless chip, and I've recently been messing about with ndiswrapper and madwifi trying to get it to work.

Finally got it working with a patched version of madwifi, and removed ndiswrapper, and all seems to be well most of the time. However, twice since then (this was a week or two ago), the machine seems to have failed to detect the chip:

First time was under WinXP - the usual system tray icon for wireless networks was missing, I had no connection or list of available networks, and the "found new hardware" wizard popped up, without saying what the new hardware was.

Second time was under Fedora - Network Manager did not list any available networks, and the chip was missing from the output of lspci.

In both cases, the LED on the front, which indicates wireless is switched on, failed to light up. I can confirm the wifi switch at the front was switched on, and I was in an area with plenty of wifi reception.

Now, that sounds like a hardware or firmware problem to me, and my understanding of how these things work suggests that simply installing a new driver can't possibly cause something like that, even if it killed the OS or wiped the hard drive. But it does seem like a bit of a coincidence - am I wrong? Could the driver possibly have had side-effects like that, and is there anything more I can do to diagnose it?

Sure, a bad driver can do that but it rarely ever happens. The last time that a potentially dangerous Linux driver was released, it was found and removed before it could do any real damage.
Now if this really happened to you, you should find plenty of similar messages on the net because it would affect anyone with your kind of hardware. More likely, you may simply have an unreliable piece of hardware, especially if the issue manifests itself under XP too.

After what you say, you fiddled around under Linux Since the card sometimes fails under Windows too it is very unlikely that it's anything but hardware fault.
AFAIK, installing a bad driver could damage not really hardware but could change the contents of a ROM on it - more likely then an infected or fake driver. This has been used to kill motherboards by viruses changing CMOS.
This is very unlikely the case. If you picked madwifi & ndiswrapper from trusted places I'd say there's no risk at all. I really think it's just a coincidence - or maybe you had to mess around to get it to work because it was already faulty?

Here is a guide to getting that card working in Linux
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/atheros-ar...rdy-heron.html


yes a bad driver can futz with hardware.. the e1000e intel Gigabit driver is a prime recent example

best of luck

No - it was because the required version of madwifi/HAL was on a branch rather than the main trunk (details here) so wasn't installed by default, and I had to compile from source which I'm not very experienced at. Had to switch my kernel to an older version I could find the headers for, but it took me a while to work that out.

I still don't know why ndiswrapper didn't work, as apparently others have managed to get it going ok, but I'm not entirely sure I was using depmod and modprobe correctly as I don't fully understand what they do and was just following a how-to. I'm also not sure I used the correct Windows driver with ndiswrapper, as the archive I downloaded had several files and no readme. The fact that lspci incorrectly reported the chip as AR5006EG (apparently a well-known problem) also didn't help.

It's not so much that I think madwifi or ndiswrapper might have released dodgy or infected software, but rather that my poking around without fully knowing what I was doing might have damaged something. Maybe through some interaction between the patched madwifi and the version installed by default, or between ndiswrapper and madwifi. I thought if the worst came to the worst I could just restore a backup of the / partition, but if I somehow changed a ROM on the hardware that wouldn't help.

Still, if you both think it's just coincidence, maybe that's all it is. I'm certainly using the wifi a lot more now that I've got it working in Linux, so maybe the problem was always there and it's only now become noticeable.

Thanks farslayer - I followed a very similar guide to that one and got it working in the end. It was only after I got it working that this intermittent fault appeared.

Nope, no way. To damage the hardware all by yourself you have to be really cunning.