Solved (problems with 3com)

[Vatiainen Heikki <hessu@cs.tut.fi>]

Thanks Nils, your PnP fix solved the problem. I was just about to start 
removing the cards and changing their places, but luckily I don't have to do 
it.


Problem description:

I have a new computer with Tyan TomcatIII main board, Plug n' Play aware BIOS, 
Sound Blaster 32 PnP card and a 3com 3c509b (Etherlink III) ISA card (PnP 
disabled).

I was trying to install Debian 1.2 but the device driver module for the 3c509 
card failed to load during the initial installation and in every reboot. The 
message from insmod was following:

3c509: WARNING! Module load-time probing works reliably only for EISA bus!!
Initialization of 3c509 failed

Adding parameters as 'insmod 3c509 io=0x300 irq=10' only suppressed the 
warning about probing, the initialization still failed. The io and irq values 
were correct.


The solution:

Nils Rennebarth <nils@nus.de> stated that the SB 32 PnP with the PnP 
motheboard causes the problem. His fix was to get the isapnptools (isapnp and 
pnpdump) and add the following lines in /etc/init.d/boot

if [ -x /sbin/pnpdump ]; then
   echo "Deconfiguring PnP devices"
   /sbin/pnpdump > /dev/null
f

The isapnptools (I used version 1.8) package can be found from 
http://www.redhat.com/linux-info/pnp/other.html


Some notes:

After getting the isapnptools I reinstalled everything. Just before selecting 
the driver for 3c509 from the device driver modules, I switched to another 
virtual console and manually did command 'pnpdump'. However this didn't work 
because of unresolved symbol '_ioperm'. After 'export 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/target/lib' the pnpdump command succeeded.

Right after the pnpdump command I edited the /target/etc/init.d/boot file and 
inserted the lines above before the lines that load any modules needed.

After that I switched back to the installation program, loaded the 3c509 
module and finished the install. The reboot was successful and everything 
works now just fine. The auto-probe works too. It does give the warning but 
the module loads ok.

Thanks again Nils and everybody else who also offered their help.

-- 
Heikki Vatiainen                  * hessu@cs.tut.fi
Tampere University of Technology  * http://www.cs.tut.fi/~hessu/
Tampere, Finland



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