Cisco LM vs PC PCMCIA Cards

Gidday All,

Got caught out with a very subtle difference between the Cisco PC4800 and LM4800 PCMCIA cards so i thought i would share my limited knowledge on these two cards.

I was trying to buy a PCMCIA card with an external aerial connection for my laptop to do some W-Driving. I came across a PCI card with a PCMCIA card piggy backed on it. Thinking that i could buy the PCI and take out the PCMCIA card and put in my laptop, i bought it. It was a great price and it came with the proprietry cable that Cisco uses and a 3 Dbi aerial.

The PCMCIA card easily sliped out out of the PCI card no probs and the cable was easy to unclip to be able to be used with the laptop on the run. However on inserting the card into the lappy it seemed to lock the whole thing up. Firmware i thought!! Dowloaded the newest firmware to the card to no avail. It was time to seek the help of the experts.

After a few google searches i found a cat that was hard core into these cards. On emailing him, he tells me that the LM version can only be used in a PCI card unless you can re write the boot blocks on the card itself. The boot block is different from the firmware. He had written some boot blocks to convert a PC to a LM (PCI mount) card but not the other way around. Going by what he inferred the boot block writing requires some narly gear and software so i left it at that.

The moral of the story.....

If you are interested in buying a Cisco 4800 card make sure you get the right one!

LM4800 is a PCMCIA card in a PCI card piggy back.... for PCI cards only....
PC4800 is a PCMCIA card that will work as normal in PCMCIA slots.

They could have had a better naming convention!!

Hope this helps someone somehwere.

Wookie.

:?

same as the nokia pccard / PCI card to PC card adapter cept they lock up in XP and 2k and can only be run on 9x. ill grab product codes tomorow at work to identify these.

The reason is that the adaprots that are card specific, are not true pc card slots, they rely on the card behaving as a PCI rather then a cardbus/pcmcia card.

There are some real ones around which when you install them in the computer you get a PCI-PCMCIA bridge arrangement as you have in a laptop, and it gets you hot swapping and working with all cards, but they are hard to spot from all the wireless crap that is floating around, and they will cause all sorts of resource conflits when you use them in a well populated machine. I think ricoh of all people made one some time back, but im not 100% sure if it was the one I saw.