Linksys Network PC Card Causes Dell Inspiron Lockup

[xweyer]

I'm working on a Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop for a friend that locks up almost immediately upon the presence of a Linksys Wireless PC card (WPCII ver.3). The laptop has a Texas Instruments PCI 1225 Card Bus Handler and the operating system is Windows 98SE.

If the card is inserted after boot up the card LEDs come on for a second and the machine locks up

If the card is present during boot up the LEDs will light initially and stay lit until the speaker beeps at which point the light goes out.

Following this when the cursor first appears (but before the icons appear) it can still be moved about the screen but it locks up pretty much simultaneously with the appearance of the icons.

I've verified that the card will work in different laptop and that other PCMCIA cards will work in this one.

I suspect a resource conflict (possibly IRQ related) but the lockup prevents me from seeing what resources the card is attempting to utilize.

In any event since '98 does not let me change the resource assignment of any of the other major components so I haven't been able to control assignments indirectly.

IRQ Sharing is presently active, but I'v tried deactivating it too with the same results.

I generated a bootlog and ran a little utility that analyzes bootlog.txt for potential problems. The following sequential lines appear related to the problem.

23:30:45 1.00 Started Texas Instruments PCI-1225 CardBus Controller (PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_AC1C&SUBSYS_009F1028&REV_01\BUS_00&DEV_04&FUN
23:30:46 0.39 Started LT Win Modem (PCI\VEN_11C1&DEV_0448&SUBSYS_20001668&REV_01\BUS_00&DEV_10&FUNC_00)
23:30:47 1.22 Starting Instant Wireless Network PC Card V3.0 (PCMCIA\THE_LINKSYS_GROUP__INC.-INSTANT_WIRELESS_NETWORK_PC_CARD-0C0B23:30:49 0.00 INITCOMPLETEFAILED = SDVXD
23:30:51 1.50 INITCOMPLETE = NAVAP

The owner of the laptop has previously been in contact with both Dell and Linksys attempting to resolve the issue but without success.

Does anyone out there have any ideas on this one?

 

[bcastner]

InitCompleteFailed = SDVXD
Windows automatically loads a miniature disk cache to increase the speed of the startup process. When the startup process is complete, the miniature disk cache is unloaded from memory. When the cache is unloaded, the "InitCompleteFailed = SDVXD" line is added to the Bootlog.txt file to indicate that the miniature disk cache has been removed from memory. This behavior is typical.

Try uninstalling the existing driver and wireless client software. Download whatever is the current version for the Version3 card from the Linksys site. Be sure to specify the correct OS.

Install the software without the card in the machine. Reboot. Disable your antivirus software. Insert the card. If it prompts for a firmware upgrade let it perform the upgrade. It it complains about digital signing, accept the driver anyway.

Do a cold start and see if the issue improves.

 

[xweyer]

Thanks for your response and the information on the INCOMPLETEFAILED = SDVXD error. The INITCOMPLETE = NAVAP error is related to Norton Anti Virus as I believe you surmised.

Sorry that I left a few relevant things out on this one.

Firstly, I’d already tried the driver route. The owner of the machine had been sent two different driver versions from Linksys when they contacted them for assistance.

Numerous attempts at installing, uninstalling and reinstalling these drivers failed to have any effect on the correcting the problem.

With respect to the bootlog file I was mostly focused on the lines pertaining to the TI 1225 and the Linksys PC card. The utility I passed the log file through to filter it for problems identified the entire section above based on load times, etc.

In researching the problem further on the both the Dell web site and various other related web pages I began to turn up a similar problems relating to the TI 1225, Windows and various 32 bit PC cards.

After a careful re-reading of these I began to notice an underlying pattern. Although issues reported with the 1225 and Windows 2000 were sometimes resolved, in no case could I find any indication that anyone who had reported a problem with using the 1225 in conjunction with Windows 9x and PC cards had ever been successful in finding a fix.

I did find evidence that Linksys had at one point made available a beta driver that was targeted for the 1225 and supposed to address the various issues with it but all those who claimed to have tried it (with 98) reported negative results and in any event it appears to have disappeared completely from the Linksys web site.

Especially telling were a couple of threads on the Dell site where Dell representatives had been attempting (unsuccessfully) to assist users and the concluding post in the thread was “Has anyone ever gotten this (hardware) to work with Windows 9x?” (If anyone would like to get a flavor of the problems reported to Dell relating to the 1225/Win 98 try searching their forum on “PCMCIA” and “not”).

Finally, I decided that I would try installing Windows 2000 in hopes of correcting lockup problem. With 2000 as the operating system the card and driver installed flawlessly, the card became fully functional and the lockups disappeared.

It is my belief that the lockups track back to a faulty implementation of IRQ sharing in Windows 98 since IRQ sharing is required by PC (32bit/Cardbus) cards and the implementation of this feature was reportedly improved in “2000”.

In any event it would have been nice if any of the participants Dell/TI/Linksys/Microsoft could have been a little more forth coming about the repeatedly identified indications of incompatibilities between their products as it was obvious that a number of their customers had wasted far too many hours in futile attempts to correct these types of problems.

 

[bcastner]

Quote: "I did find evidence that Linksys had at one point made available a beta driver that was targeted for the 1225 and supposed to address the various issues with it but all those who claimed to have tried it (with 98) reported negative results and in any event it appears to have disappeared completely from the Linksys web site."

Comment:

It was originally thought that a timing issue existing with some TI chipsets. The Beta driver was designed to workaround this possible issue. It was not in fact intended for the TI-1225, but in any case did little to actually help those who experimented with the change.

My own workaround was to use Device Manager to change the CardBus driver from the chipset specific one to "Generic Microsoft CardBus controller."

In terms of your own sanity, I suspect the change in OS to Win2k was a better choice, and certainly would save more time.

The support of 32-bit PCMCIA devices under Win98 is going to be problematic. My sympathies.