Laptops :: PCMCIA Causing Halt (Dell Inspiron 8000)

Hey guys;
I recently tried running DSL from a live CD onto an old Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. Each time I opened it up, I'd get the message:

"Processor 0 is Pentium III (Coppermine) 698MHz, 256 KB Cache
PCMCIA found, starting cardmgr."

Nothing would happen. For about 10 minutes the message just sat there and the hard drive sat silent. Seeing as nothing was about to happen, I turned off the laptop. After a bit of digging, I just typed in "dsl nopcmcia" whenever I booted it up from the CD. I forgot about the problem once I started the installation, but now after rebooting I see it hasn't gone away.

It's still going on and I don't know how to set anything similar to "dsl nopcmcia" on the boot screen; there's no option (I used LILO, not GRUB). Lemme know if this is a fixable problem or if I should just try to redo the install.

I found this elsewhere:

Quote

7. Help! PCMCIA is crashing my laptop!
Many distributions come with a PCMCIA card services package that isn't
compatible with many of the Dell's (the Inspiron 8000 has this problem
for one). The three things you need to do to try and fix it are (do
them in this order):
1) Edit your /etc/pcmcia/config.opts and change the "include
port" line to read as follows:
include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0xc00-0xcff
(i.e.: remove the range 0x800-0x8ff). This should cause the
lock-up to go away. (Thanks to Marc Swanson for this one)
1) Download the source for pcmcia-cs and recompile it, making
sure you answer Yes to the PnP Bios resource checking
question
3) If THIS isn't helping you fix it, and your
PCMCIA configuration file (under Red Hat this is in
/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia, under Debian it's
/etc/pcmcia.conf) has a line that says "PCIC=i82365",
then try changing it to say "PCIC=yenta_socket"

Unfortunately, I can't edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts because I'm running from CD and it's a symlink to the file on the CD. It should work for a HD install though.

I am also having this problem on my Inspiron 8100 laptop. I can't even get it to boot for a harddrive install. Is there any other way around this problem?

chimera451: does it stall even when you use the "nopcmcia" boot cheat code?

For jnschaeffer:
Because I don't know much about LiLo or GRUB, I was wondering if rather than trying to edit the config for that (I'm sure someone will be along shortly who can fill you in.. ;o) ) you could boot from the live CD using

Code Sample

dsl nopcmcia frugal fromhd=/dev/hdaX restore=hdaY

Where hdaX is the drive you are running your frugal install from, and hdaY is where you keep your /opt and /home directories (if you have them.

My thinking is that this would get past LiLo (or GRUB) loading crappy stuff, mount and run from your HD install and using the "frugal" parameter would allow you to mount the frugal install as RW. I was thinking that it would then be possible to go into your /etc/pcmcia/config.opts as described by JettCRX:

Quote (JettCRX @ Dec. 07 2005,13:23)

I found this elsewhere:

Quote

[*snip*] and so on..

Would that work? (I am asking because I don't actually know, and wondered if it would work.. ) Please forgive me for being lengthy about explaining where I was coming from - hopefully my logic makes sense and if I've got the wrong idea peple might at least be able to explain why it wouldn't work.. ?

Cheers and beers,
Sarah

Hey Sarah,

I didn't even realize there was an option to boot with the nopcmcia option. I am new to linux and DSL. The good news, however, is that I was able to boot and perform a frugal install. I didn't have time to look into actually fixing the pcmcia problem, but when I do I will let you guys know what I find out. Thanks for the help.

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