From: Jouni Malinen (jkmaline_at_cc.hut.fi)
Date: 2002-06-25 07:48:24 UTC
On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 12:11:33PM +0200, Martin Polak wrote:
> Yesterday I had my netgear MA401 perfectly working in ap-mode
> (hostap_cs) under Linux 2.4.18 in an Texas Instruments TI1440
> PCI/Cardbus bridge.
>
> But after about an hour it stopped working an won't initialize anymore:
> Jun 21 11:40:20 igate kernel: hostap_cs: Registered netdevice wlan0
> Jun 21 11:40:20 igate kernel: prism2_hw_init()
> Jun 21 11:40:20 igate kernel: wlan0: hfa384x_cmd - timeout - reg=0xb901
> Jun 21 11:40:20 igate kernel: hostap_cs: first command failed - is the
> card compatible?
> Jun 21 11:40:20 igate kernel: hostap_cs: Initialization failed
Updating flash with an incompatible firmware image is an easy method to get a card into this state. However, I have never heard of a case in which a card would end up in non-functional state during normal operations and would not recover even after full power cycling.
I'm assuming, you did not play around with random writemif commands (which might be able to cause some damage to the card). Apart from those, Host AP driver should not have operations that couldn't be resetted with power cycling the card.
Your card seems to have working CIS data since the driver initialization is started. However, command register remains busy and causes the timeout shown above. This would indicate either a corrupted firmware image or hardware failure. Unfortunately, this would mean that easiest way to proceed would be to contact card supplier/manufacturer for replacing the firmware/card.
-- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA