[ltp] Replacing system board

[Leon Brokken]

Thanks Bernard and Henrique,

for your wise advice ;-) I realised the risk of writing to the PCI card, but was unaware of the risk of hotplugging the card (although I agree I could have known since I'd never do it with a hard disk). I think this information would be appreciated on ThinkWiki http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_MiniPCI_network_card

So... now I have a fried system board and a possibly defect PCI card. That's going to be an expensive punishment.

Does anyone have a suggestion where to obtain a replacement system board? Of course I could send it to IBM for repair but if there are other (cheaper, but still safe!) options I'd love to hear about it! I have a T41 (2373-8RG) and am located in Sweden.

Cheers, Leon.


> 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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