Hang at boot: Compaq Presario 800

[Randy Kelsoe]

David Muse wrote:

>You may run into difficulty with the cardbus (pcmcia slot)
>later though.  Apparantly, the 2.4 kernels do something
>differently than the 2.2 kernels and the cardbus never
>gets initialized.  When I bought my laptop, I was running
>redhat 6.2 and everything worked fine.  When I upgraded
>to 7.0, the cardbus stopped working.  I tried everything
>and the only thing that I can get to work is to keep a
>stripped down redhat 6.2 installation in a small partition
>on the hard drive, boot to it when I power-on the laptop,
>then reboot (without powering down the laptop) into
>fedora.  Apparantly, the 2.2 kernel initializes the cardbus
>and it retains it's initialized state across the reboot as
>long as the laptop isn't powered off.
>
>If anyone else out there has this laptop and has a different
>solution for making the cardbus work, I'd love to hear about
>it.
>
>  
>
I have a Compaq 1205US, and I had to change the pcmcia startup script to 
run later in the boot process (IIRC). I got the info from:

    http://www.linuxlaptops.org

The document I used is now a bad link. I did find something that may be 
of interest to you (looking at a doc on the Presario 900):


      PCMCIA:

As it turns out, my problem with PCMCIA lay in the fact that for 
whatever reason, my /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia file was not configured 
correctly.  Consequently, when RH loaded the pcmcia service, it disabled 
itself.  Others may experience this problem--a sure sign is to get 
memory config errors when running cardctl ident.  These errors stem from 
not having cardmgr running!  To fix it, I had to edit the 
/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia file to say PCMCIA=yes and PCIC=i82365 and resave 
the file.  After running /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart, I promptly had WIFI 
working.  In case anyone is interested, I used the excellent guide by 
Loran at linux.oldcrank.com/tips/wpc11 
<http://linux.oldcrank.com/tips/wpc11/> to get it working.  With the 
updated hermes.conf file, all of my wireless cards were recognized.  
Also, my Cisco Aironet 350 card worked without as much as a single 
change to the conf files.


      Hope this helps.