PCMCIA cards stop working

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

Hi,

I have Win XP Pro (SP2, fully patched) running on a Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop.

I have a SanDisk CompactFlash PCMCIA adapter, which was working just fine in my laptop until a few weeks ago. I also have a Maxtor 1394 PCMCIA adapter, which has also worked fine in this machine before. Both cards work fine in 2 other laptops (1 Mac, 1 PC).

Neither of them work in this laptop anymore. The CF adapter doesn't show up in Device manager (no exclamation mark icon, or anything - it just doesn't show up), and the 1394 card shows up as an unknown "Multimedia Video Controller" which no drivers can be found for.

The only software I remember installing around the time they stopped working was some software to copy files onto a USB-only MP3 player. I have since uninstalled this software.

I have re-applied SP2 twice, and have run anti-spyware tools and my up-to-date McAfee virus checker, and nothing bad seems to be going on.

I can't even download drivers for those cards, as the support for both should be built-in to XP. It sounds more like a problem with the PCMCIA drivers (?) for WinXP than a fault with both the cards.

I really don't want to have to reinstall XP, so was wondering if anyone had any suggestions as to how I could fix this?

I have tried numerous varied searches on Google and MSDN, but can find nothing even remotely similar.

Thanks!

Dan

 

[linney]

Has PCMCIA been disabled?

Permanently Disable Wireless Card
thread779-1010102

 

[bcastner]

It does not take much of a jolt on a pcmcia adapter sticking out from your laptop to damage the pcmcia connector inside the laptop.

Fortunately these are inexpensive as parts to replace.

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

Well - the BIOS value in question was 0, rather than 4.

What is the best way of telling if the PCMCIA hardware is damaged? As I said, although the first card does not register when inserted, the second does - although not usably. Could this still be a hardware fault, or is software more likely?

Dan


The answers you get are only as good as the information you give!

 

[linney]

Look around this site and their links.

http://www.pcmcia.org/faq.htm