Acer Aspire 3050 and Intel 6230 system freeze

Hi
I replaced the wifi board on my Acer Aspire 3050 with an Intel 6230 wifi+bluetooth card.
Everything works fine until the system tries to enagage the card, then it all freezes up.

My windows xp system was working fine, but as soon as I installed the drivers I downloaded from Intel, it freezes up at some spot during the boot up process.

Likewise, if I use a liveCD with Fedora 15, it performs ok. After reinstalling the OS Fedora 15, it worked fine, but as soon as I tried to install a firmware requested by the system (firmware iwl*** 6000 or something like that) now the system freezes midpoint during the boot up.

Has any one had a similar problem with this card?

JP

 

Firmware or drivers?

 

I do not know
All I know is that it seems that whenever the system tries to call up the wireless card to start working, it freezes up.

Acer Aspire 3050 uses an AMD Turion CPU. Does the fact that the Intel 6230 is a Centrino board be an issue here?

I remember that before I installed the drivers in Windows, Windows will work fine and just show up two driverless items on device manager. When I installed the drivers, windows froze and each time I try to start windows it freezes up about at the same point.

Likewise, Fedora 15 was working fine, DMESG mentioned something about needing firmware to work with the wireless card. After yum install firmware iw** 6000 Fedora would not start again, it always freezes up at about the same spot during boot. I can use the Live CD, and I used it to reinstall the system and it worked again. But when I installed the iw** thing again, it started freezing up at the same spot as before.

It seems like the system freezes up each time the wireless board goes to work, because DMESG recognized the wireless board without problem, I guess It did not lock up the system because It used asked about them, just did not engage them to do something.

JP

 

Don't know what to say. It is already working.
I came back to it and now it is working, at least in Linux (both bluetooth and wifi).
It says it is using the iwlagn driver

dmesg says:
[ 9.349569] iwlagn: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, in-tree:d
[ 9.349573] iwlagn: Copyright(c) 2003-2010 Intel Corporation
[ 9.349677] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[ 9.349686] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 9.349697] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 9.349727] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6230 AGN, REV=0xB0
[ 9.364504] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: device EEPROM VER=0x716, CALIB=0x6
[ 9.364507] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Device SKU: 0Xb
[ 9.364510] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Valid Tx ant: 0X3, Valid Rx ant: 0X3
[ 9.364549] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 24 802.11a channels

The only thing I did differently was that while the system was booting up, I opened up a second terminal/screen to login as root.
When I went back to the main screen everything was normal.

I hope this helps anyone doing something similar.

Now I have to go and see if Windows is working...

JP

 

Ok, linux is working but no matter what I do, I cannot make it work on Windows XP. I tried the intel centrino drivers from intel's site and each time I turn on the wireless the computer crashes totally. The screeen shows a pattern and everything freezesup.

 

I don't remember which pin is it so you'll have to figure it out yourself (google it) but you can mask one of the pins on the card with duct tape so the card is constantly on meaning that the wireless switch is doing nothing.

Since your problems start when you try to enable the card it may be interesting to see what happens if it permanently enabled from the boot.

 

I have already had that scenario.
If I leave the switch "on" while the notebook boots, as soon as the notebook enters the graphic mode, it freezes. In XP it means right after the windows logo disappears and just before the mouse pointer shows up. It freezes up, the screen goes black and stays there.

Could it be that Intel placed something to make the Centrino 6230 NOT work with AMD CPUs? I have heard some rumors about it (haven't been able to track them down). My CPU is a Turion TL60

 

It's hard to tell- I've seen reports of Intel cards working fine on AMD-based notebooks and reports to the contrary.
It may depend on a specific combination rather than be a general rule.

 

I tried to install this Intel mini combo card in my Acer Aspire One, but Windows XP would not start it. After many tries, I gave up on that card because I saw a post online somewhere by a guy that had the same problem and finally found that the bios had a whitelist for that Intel card. I don't know exactly what that means, but it read to me to be an insurmountable problem. I've found an Atheros combo card on eBay that I'm going to try. It came with Atheros, so maybe it will work. Good luck to you.

 

Anyone claiming that Acer white-lists notebooks is incompetent- don't believe them.
They've never done it.