20:22 Saturday, April 04 2007

pcmcia hell

I've got a D-Link DMF-560TXD PCMCIA 10/100 NIC-modem combo. I've had it for close to 5 years, and its served me well until about 9 months ago when it just wouldn't work in any recent Linux distro. I'm certain that the card itself isn't broken, because when it had stopped working, I had two kernels on the system, and it continued to work fine in one of them (2.6.12 vintage), and didn't work in the other. By didn't work, I mean, when its inserted in any system, in dmesg I see:
cs: memory probe 0xde000000-0xde0fffff: excluding 0xde000000-0xde00ffff
pcmcia: registering new device pcmcia0.0
eth%d: pcnet_reset_8390() did not complete.
pcnet_cs: unable to read hardware net address for io base 0x2300
and its all downhill from there. I've googled quite a bit on assorted bits of that error, and turned up a number of others with a similar problem (although not on this exact card), but no real solutions.