Severe problem during download of Firmware makes PCI card useless

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 10:39:58PM +0100, Ingo Hoffmann wrote:

> I tried to follow the instruction in  Jun Sun's mini howto.
> (http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/) very closely.

Missed one part about file names (see below).. Unfortunately,
prism2_srec also missed verification code for noticing this
automatically. I fixed this so that the current CVS version of
prism2_srec does not allow this error anymore.

> This was the worst case because afterwards the card was useless. It was
> not possible to load the driver  under Linux and a tried even under W2k
> and failed as well. So now I have the situation, that I need help to
> reflash the card, because I can't use it anymore!
> 
> Can somebody help? I would also be interested whether there is a place
> where I could send the card to get it reflashed. Diffferent suggetions?
> Every hint would be greatly appreciated!

Current Host AP driver does not allow cards to be flashed if they do not
have working PRI f/w. However, this can be fixed and based on a recent
email thread, it has already been done, although for a different need
(for cards that do not include PRI or STA f/w images at all). I do not
think the patch for this has been released (hint to the author: it could
be useful for others, too ;-)), so I cannot pinpoint you to it now.

I will take a look at what would be needed to change the driver to allow
Genesis-mode operations with corrupted PRI f/w (i.e., continue minimal
operation mode even if initialization fails).

I'll try to reproduce this issue by flashing a PCI Prism2.5 card with
the images you used.. In the mean while, you could also consider
upgrading the flash with the DOS-based tool. Depending on what get
corrupted in flash, it might be enough to just write the PRI and STA
images again. Then again, it is also possible that PDA was corrupted
and it would also need to be fixed.

> # /tmp/hostap-utils-0.1.0/prism2_srec -v wlan0
> /tmp/Intersil/1.7.4/pk010101.hex
> /home/imh/TXT/Firmware/WLAN/Intersil/1.7.4/rf010704.hex

pk*.hex is non-volatile PRI f/w, but rf*.hex is _volatile_ STA f/w..
prism2_srec did not notice this difference and started happily flashing
the RAM version to flash with most probably corrupting something. CVS
version does not allow this anymore.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA