PB 1400c and Focus EtherLAN troubles

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PB 1400c and Focus EtherLAN troubles

My PowerBook 1400 has been running great, with no troubles. Of course, I had to drive myself crazy by trying to get a Focus EtherLAN card to work. This is one of the few internal ethernet cards for the 1400. I bought the card a few months back, when I still had cash; now I have none, so I cannot break down and buy a Farallon - I must get the Focus card to work!

Hardware install was easy. System profiler recognizes the card with no problems. I installed the drivers from the "FocuEtherLAN Installer 1.0". When I try to connect via DHCP with ethernet though, nothing ever happens! There is practically nothing which I can set for DHCP, since it is basically automatic. TCP/IP is enabled. This is all with Open Transport 2.0.3, in OS 8.6. Various browsers and network utilities give me errors if I try to access anything anywhere, to the effect of "Unable to initialize Open Transport". Crazy thing is that DHCP does usually give me an IP address! But I can't do ANYTHING with it. I have never experienced anything like this before.

I was guessing that this might be a driver issue, so I decided to see what was installed where. The installer has two files: "EtherTalk Phase 2" (which was on my system already), and "ValueNet.Drvr". I have searched all over my system, and there was NO ValueNet.Drvr installed anywhere! Visible or invisible, it just isn't there, unless it's a resource which got patched into something else. I am hoping that I can extract this file from the installer, but no such luck as of yet. It is an InstallerVice 3 application, I don't know where the data is , where it is supposed to go, or how to decompress it.

Any ideas? SOMEBODY out there must have gotten this card to work before! If there are any other drivers out there or tricks which I should know, I'd be extremely grateful!

Metrophage

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.drvr goes into the System file

as a drvr resource. Use ResEdit or similar to install or remove.

IIRC, all CSS 2.0 Macs (pre-PCI-based) use that driver location, leading to problems when more than one driver is needed. Only one enet drvr resource can be installed and active at one time, so if you already had a enet driver in your System file you may have problems when installing another enet drvr.

Best solution is to use a fresh System file for each new enet driver. For example, I have on my Duo 2300 several System files*, one for each different enet-equipped dock. That way when I use a different dock, I can just switch to the matching System file and reboot.

hth,

dan k

* I keep the 'spare' System files inside the System Folder, in a folder called something like 'Spare system files' or similar, containing more folders named for the matching docks.

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When I run the InstallerVise,

When I run the InstallerVise, it creates a folder in my System Folder called "DVInstaller.temp", which contains a copy of my System file. The trouble is that neither my original nor the copy have the ValueNet.Drvr resource in them. I used a util I found at , which shows all drivers which are loaded, even from other locations. No dice. I would love to install it manually, but I don't know how to extract it from the installer!

Dan, when you say "use that driver location", what location do you mean? I don't want to erase an existing DRVR if it is useful, or not going to help to install the new one. There is an Apple DRVR called simply ".ENET". Since there is no built in ethernet on the 1400, I would imagine that it could be safely removed… but not certain. Unless I can get the needed resource out of the installer, I'll need to convince it to install somehow. I will try to put a fresh System there off of the OS8.6 install cd, see if that helps. This is the only ethernet I am planning to use, so hopefully I can get by with one System file.

Thanks much, Dan - I had no idea about the drivers hiding in there!
M

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Okay, I see them now! Under D

Okay, I see them now! Under DRVR resources, there is only one called "ENET", but then I look under ENET resources and there are quite a few ethernet drivers there. Including the ValueNet I was looking for.

Dan, you say there can only be one driver in this location… do you mean in the ENET resource section, or at a particular ID#? I would really value your opinion about what drivers are actually necessary. On my PowerBook 1400c, obviously there are only a few choices - all PCMCIA and expansion bus cards for this thing are going to have their own drivers. I am surprised that any more were installed than my system gestalt would indicate are needed. My guess is that I can do without most of these Apple "Sonic16", "Sonic32", and "built-in ethernet" drivers. But of course I don't want to get rid of anything which the system NEEDS for use of ethernet. Is there an ENET id# which the ValueNet is supposed to be?

Now I am getting excited!
M

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a DL link

A quicky post:
Here's a link to a driver installer, is this what you already have?

I got this from the Mac Driver Museum archive network page.

dan k

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Yes, that's the installer I r

Yes, that's the installer I ran. After restarting I made sure that the TCP/IP control panel was set to "ethernet" and "DHCP". Every way those two factors can be set has yielded no internet. I am just trying to use the ethernet port for communicating via my cable modem. Same setup worked with no problem with my 8500(RIP) and B&W, I don't understand what would be so different about my 1400, from a settings perspective. This is why my guess has been that the card is not really installed properly yet. Otherwise, why would Open Transport not use it?

So now my ENET resources are exactly the 17 which are installed with the system, plus #1744 "ValueNet". Once I get offline on this machine, I will connect the 1400 again and see if I can figure out where the conflict might be.

M
Incidently, I checked out your web pages. Some exciting hardware antics you are doing over there! The EBM pages were great, and confirmed my suspicions. Liked the Ti repair also. I wonder if the Teac CDRW drives might write in a 1400…

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