Intersil Prism 3890 Firmware Flash

Problem:

Notebook MEDION with PRISM 3890 WLAN Card - IEEE 802.11g compliant.

I simply cant get the card working correctly under Windows XP SP1. One
time the device seems to do nothing (no scanning for predefined networks
nor for network to be discovered) and other time it does a very little
bit. However - I played around until Windows suddenly says that a
predefined network is available. Typing the WEP key and hitting Enter
brings me back to the same Dialog. grrrr

Access Point works correctly. I´ve tested the device with other networks
with different environment. Another notebook equipped with an Linksys
PCMCIA WLAN Card works fine with this net.

I´ve tried booting the notebook with a Knoppix-CD. And - wonder, wonder
- it works! I´ve entered data (WEP-Key, channel, SSID etc.) in and:
DHCP, Ping... all is fine. Looking little closer shows me that a new
Firmware is loaded temporarily into the card (RAM-Mode) - version
1.0.4.3. After reboot all is over and gone - and the device works as
used to be: NOT.

I think, loading the new firmware permanently could enable WindowsXP to
work with the card too.

Did somebody flash a new firmware and can share this knowledge? Okay -
there are some HOWTO´s for doing this but I´m not really familiar with
those and I´m not a Linux engineer.

Thanks in advance

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 02:03:46 +0200, Alexander Rudolf wrote:

>
> Problem:
>
> Notebook MEDION with PRISM 3890 WLAN Card - IEEE 802.11g compliant.
>
> I simply cant get the card working correctly under Windows XP SP1. One
> time the device seems to do nothing (no scanning for predefined networks
> nor for network to be discovered) and other time it does a very little
> bit. However - I played around until Windows suddenly says that a
> predefined network is available. Typing the WEP key and hitting Enter
> brings me back to the same Dialog. grrrr
>
> Access Point works correctly. I´ve tested the device with other networks
> with different environment. Another notebook equipped with an Linksys
> PCMCIA WLAN Card works fine with this net.
>
> I´ve tried booting the notebook with a Knoppix-CD. And - wonder, wonder
> - it works! I´ve entered data (WEP-Key, channel, SSID etc.) in and:
> DHCP, Ping... all is fine. Looking little closer shows me that a new
> Firmware is loaded temporarily into the card (RAM-Mode) - version
> 1.0.4.3. After reboot all is over and gone - and the device works as
> used to be: NOT.
>
> I think, loading the new firmware permanently could enable WindowsXP to
> work with the card too.
>

Hmmm... looks like you're using a wifi card with a prism54 chipset. The
prism54 chipset under linux looks for a binary firmware that hotplug loads
upon use of the prism54 module. The firmware of this chipset is only
loaded upon usage of the card and not placed "permanently" to the card.

If you've got the CD's for your wifi card, look for a 1.0.4.3.arm file
then place it in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware or /lib/firmware. Rename the
file to isl3890. I suggest you use the 1.0.3.0 firmware though, as 1.0.4.3
is just too unstable on Linux (read: link quality sucks so bad).

Alternatively you could use ndiswrapper.

> Did somebody flash a new firmware and can share this knowledge? Okay -
> there are some HOWTO´s for doing this but I´m not really familiar with
> those and I´m not a Linux engineer.

http://prism54.org

--


Paolo Alexis Falcone
(E-Mail Removed)