[ltp] T41 hangs in BIOS indefinitely

[Bernhard Sputh]

Hi Leon,

On Thursday 13 July 2006 09:44, Leon Brokken wrote:

> What lead to this dreadful state? I was playing around with a wireless mini
> PCI card (non-IBM ipw2915abg). In order to escape IBM's whitelist one
> should rewrite the EEPROM with corrected Subsystem ID. I know this can be a
> tricky operation, but because I had problems to patch the ipw2200 driver I
> never even reached the risky point to write to the card!

We are all a bit worried about flashing a new firmware into a device, because 
if the process fails the device is dead. I lost an expensive UW-SCSI 
controller this way, sniff :-(

However, You choose to  fry Your motherboard instead, good choice. And this 
because  You did not want to spend the extra money for an IBM wireless card? 
I know that stuff is expensive, but there are reasons for this, one is that 
it complies to the FCC rules and regulations, which I can tell You is a 
lengthy and hence expensive exercise. 

> In the normal situation, when the laptop boots with the card inserted it
> stops the boot proces and complains about an unrecognised card. So, the
> trick is to boot to the Lilo menu and pause, then insert the card, and
> continue booting. Everything worked fine that way! I inserted and removed
> the card a few times like this.

Well looks to me like You fried the PCI bus it is connected to. This is a 
mini-PCI card you are hotplugging. Unlike USB, PCI is normally not 
hotplugable. It may work a couple of times but there is no guarantee for 
this! (Yes I know there is Hotplug PCI, but this requires support by the OS 
to turn it OFF and ON again). My guess is that the BIOS is trying to probe 
the PCI bus for attached devices, and this process fails / takes ages and 
then the BIOS just hangs / crashes. 

>
> But then out of the blue I get the BIOS hang...
>
> I am desperate!!! Please tell me there's a trick to fix this?!

I guess so, the trick is to get a new motherboard. However, I also guess that 
IBM will not fix it for free even if within warranty. 


Cheers
Bernhard

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