Functional ethernet on PB3400c 200MHz |
June, 18, 2003 2:44 PM |
stephen.tate |
Dear all, i have tried serach through the list but gave up after ~15 pages on a slow link. I have installed 10.1.3 on my PB3400. It went on smoothly and works great (although a little slow but good enough of what it is needed for). However I can not get the ethernet to be recognised. In the system profiler it say slot B1 unknown. I have read that there are some ethernet only 3400's which it will never work how do I know if this is the case? Having said that this machine only ever came with the combo card and was functional under OS9 untill I lost the modem dongle. Has anybody got any ideas on how to get this working? Thanks in advance Steve Tate |
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RE: Functional ethernet on PB3400c 200MHz |
July, 01, 2003 11:18 AM |
nick.ashton |
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John, No I haven't had the MCE upgrade done to my 3400. The chip that drives the PCslot interface on the 3400 is already 32-bit compatible, it's only the card cage itself that isn't. I'll just cut & paste a bit from my original posting for clarification "As a result the card will be a tight fit in the slot and there is a potential for damage. Unfortunately you can't use a normal 16-bit card because there seems to be a driver bug which causes these types of card to either not be recognised or to cause a crash in OSX (this only relates to old-world machines, 16-bit cards are fine on supported machines)." If you want to be safe and think it is worth it then by all means get the MCE upgrade but I couldn't justify the cost on such an old machine. It's possible Ryan might have a solution for the 16-bit card bug in the works. If and when it's possible to run 10.2 on 603 CPU's you might find that Airport 3.1 SW includes support for various 3rd party 802.11g Cardbus cards. |
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RE: Functional ethernet on PB3400c 200MHz |
June, 30, 2003 7:29 PM |
earlyd416 |
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John, I caution you about the 11g cards as they are 32 bit CardBus, not 16 bit which is the PCMCIA interface in the stock 3400. Go to the LowEndMac 3400 page http://www.lowendmac.com/pb2/3400.shtml and read the two articles after the specs. They provide a wealth of information the PC card slot in the 3400. Executive Summary: Your choices are 1) use a Lucent Gold WiFi card (16 bit) or 2) spend ~$100 to get a 32 bit PCMCIA CardBus put into your 3400 to run 32 bit PCMCIA cards. For me the choice was a no brainer. --Dwight |
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RE: Functional ethernet on PB3400c 200MHz |
June, 30, 2003 9:45 AM |
john730 |
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Hey early, I too have been using my 3400 with a Lucent WaveLAN wireless card under 9.1 (I use it as a router to connect my garage network to my cable-modemed network inside, via wireless!). I want to be able to use it as a wireless Mac OS X machine though. It doesn't run 10.1.3 that bad really. It's quite usable as a basic OS X machine (i'm not planning on editing iMovies on it, no). I have tried the Lucent PC card in it while booted into 10.1.3, and as soon as the card is inserted it does crash as stephen tate says. My idea is to try a CardBus 802.11 card with either IOExperts driver, or with the hack someone out there had to use 3rd party 802.11g cards in powerbooks! |
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RE: Functional ethernet on PB3400c 200MHz |
June, 30, 2003 7:04 AM |
earlyd416 |
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John, I have wireless running on my 3400 with OS 9.1. I use Lucent Gold PCMCIA card connecting to a SMC 2655W Wireless Access Point which passes Appletalk packets. The Lucent card is a 16 bit interface which will work nicely in the 3400. I decided to keep the 3400 only using Classic because it's slow enough as it is running 9.1. --Dwight |
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RE: Functional ethernet on PB3400c 200MHz |
June, 30, 2003 1:35 AM |
john730 |
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Hey Nick! You said that you use a CardBus in your PowerBook 3400's PCMCIA slot, and that it works? You must have done the MCE CardBus upgrade then huh? If not, how is this possible? I didn't think that the CardBus PC cards and PCMCIA 2.0/2.1 standards were compatable. I would love to get wireless working in my 3400 under X! |
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RE: Functional ethernet on PB3400c 200MHz |
June, 19, 2003 4:06 PM |
nick.ashton |
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To verify if your machine has the problem Ethernet chip do a verbose boot (hold down cmd-V whilst booting OSX). You should see some messages which start "DEC21x4: ..." If you see a message which says "DEC21x4: Unsupported SROM format" then you have one of the unsupported chips. The only workround I can suggest (and it works for me) is to install a CardBus Ethernet card in one of the PCMCIA slots. The card I use is a CompUSA own-brand card which only costs $20. It uses a Realtek 8139 chip for which you can download the OSX driver at www.realtek.com.tw However, there are a couple of things you need to be aware of. The physical slots on the 3400 were not originally designed for CardBus (32-bit) cards. As a result the card will be a tight fit in the slot and there is a potential for damage. Unfortunately you can't use a normal 16-bit card because there seems to be a driver bug which causes these types of card to either not be recognised or to cause a crash in OSX (this only relates to old-world machines, 16-bit cards are fine on supported machines). The second problem is with file sharing. The Ethernet connection is fine for internet connection but you may get slow or unreliable results if using AFP filesharing. The strange thing is that I thought up until now that the combo card 3400's were not affected by this problem. Maybe you're just unlucky and have an early combo model with the dodgy chip or maybe there is something else going on. I was a bit puzzled by your comment "... was functional under OS9 untill I lost the modem dongle." I'm assuming the Ethernet is still fine under OS9 - you only need the dongle to use the Ethernet and modem simultaneously. |
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