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FnF5 - Mini Pci Card Not Seen in The Wireless Radio List ?

R30/R40, A30/A31, G40/G50 and Z60/Z61 Series. NOT for AMD-Ryzen.
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jacb
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Location: England & Vietnam

FnF5 - Mini Pci Card Not Seen in The Wireless Radio List ?

#1 Post by jacb » Wed Jul 30, 2008 11:20 pm

.
Having successfully added my Mini Pci’s information to my R40’s BIOS (http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=65155) my attention has turned to FnF5 and how to fully activate it. At the moment the card is not seen in the Wireless Radio list that FnF5 produces. Ender kindly gave me the following information .......... but when I tried modifying my AcAdaptersInfo.dll, Access Connections froze. Clearly something was wrong ..... I don’t know if some form of checksum is used?

Has anyone had any success with this problem and can you provide any pointers?

Enders information:

• If you don't have Access Connections installed, but use Fn-F5 with Hotkey driver, you just need to open TpFnF5.exe in some hex editor. Search for some ID of a supported card and replace it with ID of your card. You can see your card ID in windows device manager, under properties; it’s called something like Hardware ID. If should be in form of VEN_1234&DEV_5678, search the TpFnF5.exe for DEV=5678 (in plaintext, not hex) and replace it with correct ID.

• If you do have Access Connections installed, AcFnF5.exe takes over and will use AC libraries to detect supported cards. WWAN card IDs seem to be located in AcAdaptersInfo.dll and Acon.dll, there's more for WLAN.

One added problem for easy editing are that the strings are in Unicode. Click on the link below if you wish to see how it will look in the hex editor. Again you need to replace a supported card with the one you have.

http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f238/ ... 0/4230.png
R40 2682-K2G
England & Vietnam
Good, better, best; never rest till your good is better and your better is best

Terrahawk
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#2 Post by Terrahawk » Thu Aug 07, 2008 11:33 pm

Are you sure that all wireless card drivers have a standard interface to turn the card on and off? I would expect that all the drivers of the IBM cards have a similar interface to control the card's power status.

As for the wireless LED, I am sure that is set up in hardware - I had an Atheros card that was "adjusted" to become an IBM 802.11b/g card but as soon as you ran the official IBM drivers, it immediately locked up the computer. I traced this to the difference in pinout of the Mini PCI aux I/O pins - proper IBM cards have one of the signals routed to the LED indicator (I do not remember which) and another to the radio on/off line. I noticed that as soon as a certain line went high, the computer would freeze - I assumed that was the radio on/off line as at the same time, the wireless light would come on. I did a bit of work on the card to try to route signals to different pins but it did not work. (I have access to some nice soldering equipment).

So, if you can figure out how to patch the driver to turn on the appropriate line on the card, that's how I'd handle the LED issue. As for Fn+F5, you're way ahead of where I ever got to.
Geoff.
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jacb
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#3 Post by jacb » Wed Aug 27, 2008 7:09 am

FnF5 update.

Since my first post above, I have purchased a Gigabyte W101HT miniPCI card from OxfordTec for £24.50 inc everything (P&P, VAT etc) http://www.oxfordtec.com/uk/MiniPCI-Wir ... _info.html. The card has The Atheros AR5006X Super AG chipset and full details of the card can be found here: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Com ... =GN-WI01HT.

Windows device manager gives the device instance Id as: PCI\VEN_168C&DEV_001B&SUBSYS_E9011458&REV_01\4&16793A72&0&10F0.

Since I have been told that Access Connections can have some issues with 108Mbps, it was the first thing I uninstalled. Next I installed the Atheros 7.6.0.239 driver from http://www.atheros.cz/ and all works well.

I should point out that my CMOS has been modified in the past by running “no-1802.exe” program. The card installed without any sort of problem and seems very fast compared with my old Toshiba Satellite M10 version of the Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter.

Back to FnF5 ..... Following Enders instructions I loaded TpFnF5.exe into EditPadPro and searched in plain text (right hand search box) for VEN_168C&DEV_001 only one instance was found, VEN_168C&DEV_0012 I simply changed the 2 to a B and saved the file.

When I next pressed FnF5 - it works ! ...... I can now power down/up my card using FnF5 ................... THANK YOU ENDER.
Last edited by jacb on Thu Aug 28, 2008 2:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
R40 2682-K2G
England & Vietnam
Good, better, best; never rest till your good is better and your better is best

jacb
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Jul 29, 2008 4:30 am
Location: England & Vietnam

#4 Post by jacb » Wed Aug 27, 2008 7:27 am

Regarding the LED issue:

GIGABYTE have sent me a PDF that shows the WI01HT pinouts ....

Pin 11 = LED1-GRNP Output, Wlan_Act LED (Active high)

Pin 13 = RF_DISABLE Input Connect to GND (drive low) to disable RF, open (drive high) to enable RF.

According to http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_w ... twork_card this could be why the LED doesn’t work.

The link says that the IBM R40 needs the following if the LED is to work:

Pin 11 should = LED1_GRNP WiFi active LED +

Pin 13 should = LED1_GRNN WiFi active LED -

I have the full pinout list - if anyone would like to tackle this issue or confirm what I think the problem is?

Can I attach a PDF to a post on this foum? If so, how do I do it?
R40 2682-K2G
England & Vietnam
Good, better, best; never rest till your good is better and your better is best

beGi
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#5 Post by beGi » Thu Aug 28, 2008 7:42 am

OK, I did not change anything (WLAN card), but once or twice it happened that i could not manage my radio power status, solution is taken from this forum (forgot who and where gave it), the only one that worked for me..... I do not use Access Connections. Here are the steps:

1. Uninstall the wireless driver using Add/Remove Programs
2. Uninstall the Hotkey utility using its Setup program (uninstall is an option in the Setup app; it doesn't appear in Add/Remove Programs control panel)
3. Restart
4. Delete the Hotkey folders from C:\Program Files\Lenovo\PkgMgr [key step!]
5. Reinstall the Hotkey Utility and the wireless driver
6. Restart

Hope it helps, it is much simpler and "user-friendly"....

jacb
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Jul 29, 2008 4:30 am
Location: England & Vietnam

#6 Post by jacb » Thu Aug 28, 2008 2:12 pm

beGi wrote:OK, I did not change anything (WLAN card), but once or twice it happened that i could not manage my radio power status, solution is taken from this forum (forgot who and where gave it), the only one that worked for me..... I do not use Access Connections. Here are the steps:

1. Uninstall the wireless driver using Add/Remove Programs
2. Uninstall the Hotkey utility using its Setup program (uninstall is an option in the Setup app; it doesn't appear in Add/Remove Programs control panel)
3. Restart
4. Delete the Hotkey folders from C:\Program Files\Lenovo\PkgMgr [key step!]
5. Reinstall the Hotkey Utility and the wireless driver
6. Restart

Hope it helps, it is much simpler and "user-friendly"....
Errrm Sorry BeGi ............ but I don’t think you are quite following what is going on here with FnF5 issue.

Your fix will reinstall the drivers If (and only if) your TpFnF5.exe lists your exact card within its internal white list. If your card is NOT listed then follow the above instructions to add a particular card to TpFnF5.exe thereby making the function work.
R40 2682-K2G
England & Vietnam
Good, better, best; never rest till your good is better and your better is best

gooberpea33
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Location: Massillon, Ohio

I have a R52 Please Help!!

#7 Post by gooberpea33 » Thu Aug 28, 2008 7:43 pm

I have an R52 laptop and I need to put a new wireless card in. I'm ready to fix the bios, but I can't find any info for this model, and the hardware IDS for the other models don't show up. Please Help!
Thanks!

jacb
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Jul 29, 2008 4:30 am
Location: England & Vietnam

Re: I have a R52 Please Help!!

#8 Post by jacb » Fri Aug 29, 2008 3:53 am

gooberpea33 wrote:I have an R52 laptop and I need to put a new wireless card in. I'm ready to fix the bios, but I can't find any info for this model, and the hardware IDS for the other models don't show up. Please Help!
Thanks!
Hi gooberpea33

I am a little confused by your posting ..... You say you need to put a new card in but the hardware ID's don’t show up. They wont until you put a new card in the PC!

If you want to look up a cards ID before you buy it (I don’t know why you would want to?) have a look at http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/iii/?s=1 .... Eg: all Atheros cards start 168c.

I don’t now anything about the R52 but search the Lenovo web site and talk with the likes of OxfordTec as a starting point. If you can get a standard IBM card, then buy it. If you need to fit a non standard card then the fun starts. First we need to know exactly what you are trying to fit.

Good luck.
R40 2682-K2G
England & Vietnam
Good, better, best; never rest till your good is better and your better is best

gooberpea33
Posts: 10
Joined: Thu Aug 28, 2008 4:21 pm
Location: Massillon, Ohio

#9 Post by gooberpea33 » Fri Aug 29, 2008 9:44 am

alright, I definitely wasn't detailed enough. I need to modify my bios to make the wireless card work in the laptop that i have, but i cannot find the "whitelist" in the bios of my machine. I have the Hardware id for both the old card and the new card. and i have the bios uncompressed. I'm just at a loss when it comes to finding the whitelist.
I have the card already.

jacb
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Jul 29, 2008 4:30 am
Location: England & Vietnam

#10 Post by jacb » Sun Aug 31, 2008 1:43 am

gooberpea33's question continued at http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=65155
R40 2682-K2G
England & Vietnam
Good, better, best; never rest till your good is better and your better is best

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