[ltp] USR PC-Card Hangs 600e

[Huntress Gary B NPRI]

I have a Thinkpad 600e running RedHat 7.3.  It has been running flawlessly for many months.  Recently, I was extremely lazy and hasty and I shut down X using ctrl-alt-backspace.  When I did this, the screen went black and the system did not recover and I ended up powering off.

Immediately upon the next reboot I noticed two things.  First, the console video mode was different.  Until this time all console text had a large black margin (at least 1 inch on all sides) indicating a higher vid mode I think.  Now, the characters are all larger and there is no margin....this is an annoyance only because I don't know what caused it.  I'm only mentioning it because it occured simultaneously with the second symptom.

Second, I have a supported PCMCIA modem that I have been using fine for a long time ( 28.8 XJ3288 made by USR, repackaged by Gatway).  Now, after the ctrl-alt-backspace hangup that I mentioned above, any insertion of this card causes my system to lock up completely.  I get one beep upon insertion, there is no second beep (neither the high nor low tone) and I must power down to recover.

I have tried everything I can to rebuild this system in order to use this modem again.  Besides numerous kernel rebuilds, I have completely reformatted and reinstalled RH7.3 and the symptoms are the same.  This led me to believe it is a setting in the BIOS.  I entered the thinkpad bios by holding F1 while booting and there appear to be no configuration for pcmcia or serial ports.  Finally this made me think the modem was actually bad....unfortunately I just put it in another system and it works fine.

So, what in the world did I do to my system that it can no longer accept this card?  Other PCMCIA cards work fine, but this modem causes a complete lockup!

Regards,

Gary Huntress