How to detect a "misflashed" card?

[Stefan Misch]

Hello,

I think I got ripped off on ebay but I'm not sure about it.

Here's the story: I bought a Tekram PCF200 Wireless LAN-card for my 
notebook. Before the purchase I checked the drivers to make sure it uses 
a chip supported by Linux. As you may already know this chip uses the 
Prism 2.5 chip.

I got this card very quickly but when I put it into my notebook ( using 
a custom kernel v2.6.1 and its drivers for the card) I got the following 
errors in my log-files:

/var/log/messages

#Jan 16 17:57:08 schleppi kernel: cs: memory probe 0x0c0000-0x0fffff: 
excluding 0xc0000-0xcffff 0xd8000-0xfffff
#Jan 16 17:57:08 schleppi cardmgr[110]: socket 1: Linksys WPC11 11Mbps 
802.11b WLAN Card
#Jan 16 17:57:09 schleppi kernel: eth0: Intersil firmware earlier than 
v0.8.x - several features not supported
#Jan 16 17:59:08 schleppi cardmgr[110]: socket 0: Linksys WPC11 11Mbps 
802.11b WLAN Card
#Jan 16 17:59:09 schleppi kernel: eth0: Intersil firmware earlier than 
v0.8.x - several features not supported


/var/log/syslog

#Jan 16 17:57:09 schleppi kernel: eth0: Error -2 reading firmware info. 
Wildly guessing capabilities...
#Jan 16 17:57:09 schleppi kernel: eth0: failed to read MAC address!
#Jan 16 17:57:09 schleppi kernel: orinoco_cs: register_netdev() failed
#Jan 16 17:57:10 schleppi cardmgr[110]: get dev info on socket 1 failed: 
Resource temporarily unavailable
#Jan 16 17:59:09 schleppi kernel: eth0: Error -2 reading firmware info. 
Wildly guessing capabilities...
#Jan 16 17:59:09 schleppi kernel: eth0: failed to read MAC address!
#Jan 16 17:59:09 schleppi kernel: orinoco_cs: register_netdev() failed
#Jan 16 17:59:10 schleppi cardmgr[110]: get dev info on socket 0 failed: 
Resource temporarily unavailable

I also tried 2.4.23 and 2.4.24 (with their drivers) but they say the 
same and are less informative:

/var/log/messages

#Jan 16 18:37:53 schleppi cardmgr[95]: socket 1: Linksys WPC11 11Mbps 
802.11b WLAN Card
#Jan 16 18:37:53 schleppi kernel: cs: memory probe 0x0c0000-0x0fffff: 
excluding 0xc0000-0xcffff 0xd8000-0xfffff
#Jan 16 18:37:53 schleppi kernel: orinoco_cs: RequestIRQ: Resource in use

/var/log/syslog
#Jan 16 18:37:54 schleppi cardmgr[95]: get dev info on socket 1 failed: 
Resource temporarily unavailable

So I tried this card in two other notebooks with Windows 2k and Windows 
ME. The cards were detected but they were never initialised correctly 
(with the oh so nice "Code 10" error message) and it always had the 
exlamation mark in the device manager.

What I'm wondering now is why is it detected as a WPC11. I know that it 
is a card with the Prism chip as well but it's not a Linksys card but a 
Tekram. The second is that it says that the card has a too old firmware.

I haven't found much information about old firmware versions but it 
seems to me that this message just means that it just gets bogus when it 
tries to read the information on the card.

So I've contacted the vendor about my suspicions but she hasn't answered 
yet.

I tried to gather a little more information and found this text: 
http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/stories/Ingo_Hoffmann_broken_card.txt

What I did afterwards was getting the hostap drivers from the CVS and 
installed them. Suddenly I didn't have only one but two new network 
interfaces: wlan0 and wifi0. None of them however were able to accept 
settings from `iwconfig`.

So I continued to follow this text's suggestions and loaded the firmware 
files mentioned there into RAM and suddenly wlan0 was acting as it was 
supposed to. I could set and get information. The only thing that didn't 
work was getting a connection to get an IP address from my 
accesspoint/router. But the card was blinking so something was going on.

So the card acts like it's working but it still doesn't. Is there a way 
how I can identify the card's firmware correctly (assuming there is a 
correct firmware on it)?

I also sent an email to Tekram Support but I doubt that they will hand 
out much information.

Thanx in advance for your help :)

bye
Stefan Misch