PCMCIA NIC From Bootdisk

[MichiganRon]

I have a Dell Latitude C500 laptop with a wireless mini-PCI card installed. The computer has Windows 2000 installed.

I want to take an image of the hard drive for use with other C500's. I don't want to use the wireless card for this process because it is very bandwidth intensive. I have a bootdisk (with Drive Image Pro 4.0) that I normally use with a Xircom RealPort 10/100 PCMCIA card to image laptops. The bootdisk/Xircom combo works with other laptops, but for some reason doesn't seem to work with the C500.

The computer gives an error message that there is no NIC installed. I have tried this on more than one C500 and I have tried disabling the wireless card in the CMOS, but to no avail. I have also tried other Xircom cards as well as rebuilding the bootdisk. I even broke down and created a bootdisk to use the wireless card. Nothing seems to be working and I'm out of guesses. There seems to be no real help from either Dell's or Powerquest's (Drive Image Pro) websites.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

 

[smileybry]

sometimes the xircom's get stuck in "modem" mode. And on occasion will work fine on all other computers. Try removing the wireless card, and also unistalling any software that came with it (most likely a program to checkthe signal strenght, and set it up with the base station) then install the drivers for win2k for the xircom. if you can use the xircom for data transfer from here, use a program such as Symantec's Ghost (on all copies of norton system works). Also, make sure that the laptop (the dell) does not have a built on modem. if it does you may want to disable it in the bios.

 

[MichiganRon]

Thanks for the suggestions, but no modems are involved. Neither the Xircom nor the laptop have modems. Also, I am booting from a floppy so I should be able to use what ever OS is on the bootdisk, right?

 

[MichiganRon]

FYI: Problem solved. The problem was due to a IRQ conflict. After calling both Dell & PowerQuest (PowerQuest was more helpful), I figured out that the interrupt was assigned by the NET.CFG file. I just assigned the NIC a different IRQ and the bootdisk works!

Thanks for your suggestion anyway, smileybry.