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Re: NIC problem



On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 12:02:52PM -0700, Craig Jones wrote:
| I have an old 386 on which I am trying to do an FTP install of potato.
| The NIC inside is a Western Digital and seems to be functioning all right
| (I got linux going from one of those floppy distributions, set everything
| up and was able to ping everywhere and log in to a computer at work.  So
| the NIC and cabling are working all right.)
| 
| When I boot off of the rescue/root/driver-1.bin files, everything goes all
| right until it tries to do a modprobe on the wd.o module.  The default for
| that module is right as I checked it doing a ftp install using RedHat and
| the NIC worked.  But, under Debian it keeps coming up device is not
| working and it might be an IO/IRQ problem.
| 
| Any ideas on what I can try?  The NIC does work.  The IO/IRQ etc "should"
| be right, but that boot version of linux just does not want to modprobe.

Alt-Ctrl-F2 will take you to a shell (as root) where you can run
commands and see what is/isn't there.  I don't know how much of a
system you will have or at what point comming from floppies.

I have an NE2000 clone ISA NIC in an old 486.  When I tried to load
the module it complained that ISA cards _need_ to have the base io
specified.  PCI cards are nicer because they figure it out for you.  I
tried 0x300 (I don't know why that number popped in my head, maybe I
saw it a couple days before when I turned of PnP with the DOS util)
and it seems to work.  The module loaded and pick IRQ3.  I haven't had
a second machine on the network simultaneously to really test it, but
the switch's LED's blinked when I tried to ping a (nonexistant) host.

I would suggest switching to the "F2" console (as above) and trying :

modprobe wd io=0x300

(or insmod wd io=0x300)

and seeing what it does/says.  



Another option would be to put the hd into a newer machine and install
from there.  I had to do this with that 486 because it couldn't boot
from the cd drive I borrowed (old bios) and DOS sucks (no cd driver to
let me use loadlin).

-D



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