How to view/remove drivers for, say, an ethernet network card?
 

On My Gutsy laptop I replaced my pcmcia wifi card and now it freezes at about 5% of the Ubuntu boot-up progress bar.

On my Debian desktop (Er, don't remember version but shouldn't matter all that much...I think) I moved my hard-drive from one pc to another (almost the same model, but not quite) and now no ethernet card shows up.

So why might this happen, or more importantly, how does one troubleshoot this--i.e. see what driver is being loaded for network cards and remove/reinstall the card?

Hello lumix! It's hanging/freezing (most likely) because Linux is trying to load a driver and configure it not knowing that that driver is incompatible with your hardware (the pcmcia wifi card). It is scanning the hardware on your laptop, seeing that wifi card and then it 'looks' to see if it knows how to handle it. Apparently it thinks it has a driver module that can handle it. So when that driver module is loaded, it tries to talk/configure with the wife card and it get's stuck b/c it can't. So it just sits there...


It would be nice to see the boot messages at this point if you can get them, but I'm pretty sure we can try and fix this without that output. You need to get into the system somehow so I since it's the pcmcia card that may be the problem, try adding this to the boot line in grub:This may or may not work (This will work in RHEL, but I don't know about ubuntu). If not, then add this to the boot line to boot into single user mode:Once you're in the system at a command line, you're going to need to examine your hardware withFrom that output, look for the sections dealing with NETWORK/ETHERNET/WIFI hardware and try and find the entry for your pcmcia card. In you're wifi cards section, there should be a line(s) about kernel driver/modules. One of those is your problem. So then, you will need to see if you can find an updated version of that driver on the internet.