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PCMCIA/Cardbus under Windows 98 - no cards recognized

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First post, by caz

Posted on 
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Heyho,

I've done some googling on the matter and tried some different things but I can't get it to work. For the record: I have little experience with retro computers.
Hope this is the correct place to ask!

What I'm trying to do:
- use a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card to run under 98 SE (German edition)

Info on the current situation:
- Laptop: Compaq LTE 5250 - should be fine with 16bit and 32bit cards, both fit fine into the slots. I have one USB card for each, neither works. While I do have an LTE5100 I could technically test them with, that one came with completely broken slots
- tried three different cards, doubt they are all broken
- 2 of them are extremely generic with no brand name (those 4-port-cards that come with those small blue driver CDs, all over German ebay), the third is one of these: https://oemdrivers.com/pcmcia-%20ake-bc168-card-bus-usb-2-0
- drivers: Used the German version of the NUSB driver and the driver from the above link
- Both drivers installed normally, I followed the reboot procedures as instructed for the NUSB driver when you run the setup
- PCMCIA slots are enabled in BIOS. The CMOS battery is dead, but this seems to be the default setting anyway. I found no other related settings.
- when I check the PCMCIA slots in Windows, they show up as working but empty
- no unknown devices in device manager
- no reaction from windows at all when I plugin different USB sticks, hardware scan/reboot doesn't help
- FYI, I have no CDROM drive for the laptop, only floppies & the CF card

I watched a couple of videos where people use these cards but it seems to just work for everyone, even with the same AKE card as above, so people don't really go in-depth. Most I found is people mentioning the NUSB driver.

I suspect since the PCMCIA controller shows up in device manager, that part should be alright and the issue is more with me doing the USB driver installation wrong. But I honestly have no clue.

Happy to provide more information as needed. I just want to get around using floppies for data transfers to my desktop after the drive in the older laptop disintegrated.

Cheers,
Caz

Reply 1 of 1, by Thermalwrong

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I think the LTE 5xxx series might predate Cardbus?
Test with a basic PCMCIA card like a compact flash adapter since those aren't Cardbus.

There should be a key that would stop you even inserting a Cardbus card into a PCMCIA slot but maybe that's not implemented on this model. Generally you can identify Cardbus cards from PCMCIA because of the gold bump section around the end of the card that you'll see on Cardbus, where PCMCIA will just have a flat bit of metal.
It's essentially putting an ISA card in a PCI slot but without the shorting out and breaking stuff.

If the does LTE 5200 *does* happen to support Cardbus, check whether there's an option in the BIOS to select between PCIC / PCMCIA mode and Auto / Cardbus mode.

edit: yeah this confirms it: http://greyghost.mooo.com/lte5000/ltefaq.htm - search for Cardbus on this page
NUSB only adds USB mass storage support, it's not a USB driver / enabler on its own

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