Preventing module loading/hardware detection of my WiFi Card

[viderporst]

Greetings,

my Laptop has an Atheros AR5007EG mini PCIe WiFi card. This card is not supported by madwifi yet( "Hardware revision not supported" error in the proprietary hal part), but the PCIID was also used for other cards, that are supported, so it's always being loaded. But after ath_pci has been loaded once, the card is put into a non functional state, so that ndiswrapper can't use it.

Usually i just solve this problem by blacklisting ath_pci in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, but even though i used the Permanent Disk Image feature, it is still being loaded during autodetection.

Is there a way, besides remastering, to prevent the ath_pci (and other ath_*) module to be loaded?

[chip.ling]

Greetings,

my Laptop has an Atheros AR5007EG mini PCIe WiFi card. This card is not supported by madwifi yet( "Hardware revision not supported" error in the proprietary hal part), but the PCIID was also used for other cards, that are supported, so it's always being loaded. But after ath_pci has been loaded once, the card is put into a non functional state, so that ndiswrapper can't use it.

Usually i just solve this problem by blacklisting ath_pci in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, but even though i used the Permanent Disk Image feature, it is still being loaded during autodetection.

Is there a way, besides remastering, to prevent the ath_pci (and other ath_*) module to be loaded?

You pretty much fall into the case that I had encountered for my Dell D600 and D610 where the not-working Broadcom BCM43xx driver is loaded automatically on knoppix boot-up time.

What you need to do is to remove the installed ath_pci driver first by

 # modprobe -r ath_pci_module_name

Then follow whatever you ndiswrapper steps are.

Take a look at Q2

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Network_FAQ

to see how I overcome my Dell D600 & D610 wireless issue by the ndiswrapper method.

Take a look at Q4 too if you are using the wireless all the time and do not want to re-run all the ndiswrapper setup steps.

Rgds,
Chip