CF-19 MK2 with Gobi 2000 WWAN problems

I recently bought a used CF-19 MK2 (19FHGAXAM) that came with a Verizon MC5725 WWAN card. After swapping the harddrive with an SSD and doing a fresh install of Vista Pro, I swapped out the WWAN card with a Gobi 2000. WWAN is still an option in the bios, and windows actually sees the card (it asks to install the drivers on boot up and it shows up listed as a Gobi 2000 in the device manager) but I cant get the CSA software to do it's thing; it always fails with a "Gobi device not found".

I've tried to do my homework on this but I have run into some dead ends. I assume the dipswitches are set correctly or else it wouldn't show up at all (I have them set to all on), but the toughbooktalk.com guides suggests that it should be on-on-off-off, which when set that way the wwan card no longer showed up in the bios or windows. It also mentions that BIOS version V2.00L15 is required, but there doesn't seem to be any place online to download BIOS updates for the MK2s. I am currently running V2.00L14.

Does anyone know if I am missing a step or something? I would assume since it shows up in windows that the dip switches/bios thing must be alright, but if it can't install the drivers there must be something wrong.

 

I think, if the card is not made for panasonic, u will have problems, because the inf-file has no data for ur card. U can check the hardware id in ur device manager (details) and the same should be in ur inf-file. If not, try to manipulate the inf-file or try an different driver or buy a panasonic card.
Any hints in ur log.txt-file or in ur event log?

 

You will need a Panasonic Gobi card. The dip switches must set for the Gobi card. There is a diagram near the switches. The setting is UNDP1. You must update the bios and EC to enable Gobi. Give me your email address and I'll send you a link to the update.

 

Remember to remove the battery and hold the power button down for 10 seconds to remove the power from the capacitors in the unit too when changing dip switches.

 

Thanks for the replies!

I bought a handful of the Gobi 2000 devices off an e-recycler on ebay a while ago (long before I knew I wanted a Toughbook), so I am not sure what they were originally made for. Here's what I have:



From what I've seen of Toughbook Gobi cards, they look pretty much the same, but I have no idea if you can determine compatibility visually. would be a bummer if this card is no good for the Toughbook

db04p71, my email address is [email protected] . I totally appreciate it, thank you!

Thanks again everyone for the help!

 

It has something to do with the firmware.

We're not sure ourselves.

 

I bet if you did a search on here about this very same card you will find at least a couple hundred post on this and still no luck

 

anyone checked this?:

"Installing the Drivers

The problem with installing the drivers is caused by a library that Qualcomm uses to support the installation called difxapi. The supporting DLL for this API is included in the installation package and it conflicts with the Windows 7 version, this conflict causes a custom action in the installation routine to fail and forces a rollback of the installation.

To fix the problem we need only to replace this DLL with the one from your Windows 7 installation. If you don’t have it already you need to download the driver installation package from your laptop manufacturer’s support site and extract it somewhere.

Starting from where you unarchived your package look for a directory similar to “\Driver\Source\Module Retargetable Folder\QCUSB-Lenovo\DriverPackage\Microsoft\DIFxAPI”. Now you just need to replace the difxapi.dll here with the one from “c:\windows\system32\”. If you are running 64-bit Windows then copy the DLL into the amd64 subdirectory, for 32-bit installations copy the DLL into the x86 directory, if you’re not sure you can safely copy it into both directories.

Once you replace this DLL the setup.exe under the “Driver” directory should now run successfully. Once the installation finishes verify that you have the “QCUSB-*” and “QDLService” directories under “c:\QUALCOMM”."

Qualcomm Gobi WWAN Card on Windows 7

 

Got it working! Well, I only have the sim card from my smartphone to test with, and it didn't let me connect to the data network (hopefully because it isn't a data only sim card), but it was able to receive sms messages so at least the radios were talking.

It now seems pretty evident that the Panasonic CSA software is simply not going to cooperate with a non-Panasonic Gobi card. At least, not without some serious poking around. What I ended up doing was Googling the hardware ID for my card (USB\VID_1199&PID_9001), which turned up some Toshiba Seirra Wireless Gobi drivers and their equivalent CSA software. And they worked! Luckily it must not be doing any hardware check beyond the wwan card.

I am not entirely sure if the BIOS update was needed since the Panasonic CSA stuff behaved exactly the same before and after, but I cant go back and the Toshiba drivers on the old BIOS obviously.

 

PLZ HELP ME CF-19 (mk2) Bios V2.00L15

@: [email protected]

 

Can You send link to the BIOS v2.00L15 to me?
E-Mail: [email protected]