[GigaWatt]

Hello, I'm new at this forum so I really don't know how things go, so I'm just going to lay it ot for you :

I found an old Ethernet (not Fast Ethernet, just Ethernet ) adapter: HP PC LAN Adapter NC/16 TP (2100/1500T Compatible), ISA slot compatible. The newest driver for this card dates from 1997, and its is for DOS, Win95, WinNT 3.0, WinNT 3.1 and WinNT 3.11. I tried fideling with the dirvers form different sources, different uploaders, different editions (mostly from driverguide.com), but nothing seemed to work. So I tried looking for compatible drivers from other manufacturers (the card said 2100/1500T compatible, I thought it might be some kind of a common chipset most network adapters use), but the only ones I could find that were for Win2000 (I use WinXP SP2, most of the drivers compatible with Win2000 are also with XP) were made with PCI slots, so the hole interface compatibility thing goes down the drain.

I know the card is not melfunctioned, I touched one of the ICs on the card, they were warm, so that means that the ICs are active and running, just can't find the right protocol to communicate with the mobo.

Any kind of help would be more then welcome, it's not the money that are in question here, new LAN adapters can be found for less than 5 euros a piece, but it's the pleasure of making something so old be usefull again (I think the card was made in 1992, or atleast that is when they started making them ).

Here are some other specifications that are written on the card:

Copper printed on the card:

HP J2405-80001

The big IC in the middle of the card (I guess this is the main controller chip and I/O controller for the whole card):

AM79C960KC (written with larger letters)
9637EPA B2 (written with smaller letters, under the one written above)

Thanks upfront, as I said, any kind of help is welcome

PS: If it helps solving the problem, I tried to install the drivers for the car (and the card itself) on an old Acorp 6BX/VIA/ZX81 moterboard.

[PangingJr]

so, you don't want to buy a new NIC (or rest of hardwares for that matter) that's compatible with your current operating system.
you're making this hard for yourself. anyway, maybe Judas can help you out with this, he likes to install XP/Vista on some outdated hardwares, and succeeded many time.

[GigaWatt]

No, that's not the case, I have a new PC (Abit IB9 LGA775 P965 Chipset, 2X2GB DDR2 800MHz Kingston, Core 2.0 Duo @ 2.0GHz (currently overclocked to 2.5 per core), Biostar nVidia GeForce FX 7200GS, ... etc.), I just want to use this old one for an experiment I've been working on, and the card too, I just need it to get it running, to find the apropriate I/O adresses, IRQ, and DMA access of the card, the old cards didnt have an auto configure I/O, IRQ and DMA, they had them written down in the firmware, so you had to configure it manualy in the OS, but I don't now how since I can't find the specifications for the card anywhere.

Anyway, thanks for you help, , will write a PM to Judas

[GigaWatt]

Some good news

OK, here is the situation at present. The OS (WinXP SP2) somehow managed to recognize that there is a new hardwre pluged in the system. Now I think this is because I set the IRQ 05 to be Legacy ISA the PNP configuration in the motherboards BIOS. The maual (whell... it was the readme.txt text file in the oroginal Win95 and WinNT drivers) said that the card uses DMA 05 and IRQ 05 as a default setting (I guess it is written in the cards firmware). In the DOS drivers version it said that you could change the IRQ and DMA, but only after you install the card with it's original settings (i.e. IRQ 05, DMA 05). So I checked if any other devices are using DMA 05. There werent any so, as I said before, I changed the IRQ 05 setting in BIOS to be Legacy. Before that it was set to PCI/ISA.

So now WinXP SP2 recognizes it as a network device, but the driver the OS proposes is not a HP product driver, or a 2100/1500T Compatible driver (an AMD PCnet ISA card has the same 2100/1500T compatibility with the HP NC/16 card, but also it's drivers are outdated, compatible with Win95, WinNT, Win3.0, etc.). I'm not even shure how WinXP found the hardware, I've neer seen an ISA device to be autodetected by any edition of Windows, especialy not XP... Anyway, the driver that XP proposes is a BCM5701 Gigabit Ethernet card driver (it si shown as a compatible hadware driver on the list of drivers), but when I install the driver, it returns a Code 10 error ("The device cannot start" error). There is no resources tab in the Device Manager when I click Properties on the device (i.e. the BCM5701 Gigabit Ethernet card), so I really can't tell where the problem is. I don't have any knowledge of the specifications for this device, so I can't tell if it's compatible or not with the HP NC/16 TP card.

So, if anyone can find me some specifications or drivers, or any kind of help for the BCM5701 Gigabit Ethernet card, it would mean a lot, thanks upfront .

[IvanV]

I don't know why Windows suggested that card as compatible, gigabit Ethernet brought some new technologies not present in the older standards and it is highly unlikely that a 10Mbps card could work with any 1Gbps card's driver, so I think you should look elsewhere. If the chip was ever used on a higher end network card (and if such things exist), those things are more likely to have had a long support cycle and drivers for Win2k and XP. Still, the easiest way of making that old PC and card useful is to install an older version of Windows on it. Also, you may be luckey with some linux distribution.

[GigaWatt]

OK, I have a new idea, how about I install VMware Workstation on XP, then install Win2000 SP4, and see if the virtual OS (i.e. Win2000) finds the apropriate drivers. If Win2000 finds them, then I open the device manager in Win2000, go to the Properties drop menu of the device, go to the Drives tab, and click on the Driver Details button. Once there, I know the location of the .sys and (or) .inf files used for the device, so I just copy them in XP, and tell the Device manager where to look for them. I think that might work...

I could also try some other operating systems, maby Windows Vista...

I don't want to migrate to Win98, it's too unstable, crashes all the time, and Win95 is too outdated, I'll need to install a whole bunch of updates , and Linux is a totally new thing for me, I've configured a ruter once under Unix, but that's about all I know of configuring devices under Linux.

Anyway, I'll give it a go, see how things work out

[Judas]

try windows ME .... hey it might work out very well.... ME is a touch and go system... it either works extremely well.. or not at all lol

[GigaWatt]

YEAAAAAAAAH , i finaly did it, after many many hours of work (about half a day actually ), I finaly did it. Now here is the hole history of the process :

First, I installed VMware Workstation on XP, and I installd Win2000 SP4 on on the virtual machine, but the virtual machine makes a virtual network adapter that can be routed to the physical one, so there is not much use of the VMware Workstation when you are experiencing hadware difficulties. Besides, because the LAN card was found as a "non working" device under XP (Code 10, Device cannot start), the physical adapter (i.e. HP PC LAN Adapter NC/16 TP) was not shown on the list of LAN adapters with which the virtual card can route through (can share the same resources as the host operating system).

So I tried a different approach, I also had an old Seagate 4GB HDD that was no use to me before (untill now). So I decided to install WIn2000 SP4 on that hard disk. At first the OS recognized the device as a networking (LAN) device, but didn't know what kind of a device it was (it wrote Unknown Device in the device manager). So I tried to manually install some of the devices it was compatible with (2100/1500T Compatible). The Win2000 SP4 had a longer list of old model compatible devices then XP did. Althow HP was on the list of manufacturers as a compatible device, but this model wasn't anywhere on the list of models, so I tried different models from different manufacturers. Here is a list of the ones I tried:

Tulip NCC-16 ISA+ TCI00D0
Exos 105
Novell/Anthem NE1500T
Novell/Anthem NE2100
ALLIED TELESIS AT1700
ALLIED TELESIS AT1720
Allied Telesyn ATK1500
SysKonnect Inc SKD8000
Boca pcNET isa/PNP BRI1001
Microdyne NE2500T MDY1901 & MDY1900
Exos 105 pnp8277
........... etc.

There where many other cards that claied to be 2100/1500T compatible, but none of them worked. But because the manufacturer for the controler chip was AMD, I stuck to fideling with the AMD drivers. Now remeber, these are all drivers a found in the list of drivers for network adapters in Win2000, none of the drivers i downloaded worked. The list of card manufactured by AMD (or "Advanced Micro Divices (AMD)" as the name of the manufacturer read in the list) was the following:

AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter (VLB)
AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter/ISA+
AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter/ISA+ (Legacy Mode)
AMD PCNET Family ISA Ethernet Adapter
AMD PCNET Family PCI Ethernet Adapter
AMD PCnet-Home Based Adapter

Now, Win2000 suggests the AMD PCnet-Home Based Adapter as a compatible adapter (that is shown shen you click the option Show Compatible Hardware in the Update device driver wizard), but when i tried to install this driver the system just returned a blue screen (of death ), with a hex adress error code written all over it. I tried to install the driver again, but the same thing agan, so I decided to try the other listed models. Now, before i go any further (with this term paper, hahahahha), here is what I read in one of the readme.txt files that came with the drivers for the HP NC/16 LAN card I donwnloaded from driverguide.com, actually this was the readme file from the WINNT installation dir of the driver:
____________________

The resources the adapter can use are the following:
Interrupt channel 3,4,5,9
DMA channel 3,5,6,7
I/O address starting with 300,320,340,360

NOTE: Many SCSI adapters use DMA Channel 5. This adapter
defaults to DMA channel 5. Make sure that this adapter
does not use a channel used by any installed SCSI adapters.

IF installing the HP J2405A into an EISA slot in the computer:
Select values to match the resources set in the EISA
configuration utility.
____________________

Now what this means is that you have to free up the IRQ 05 (put the IRQ 05 channel under the PNP Configuration tab in BIOS under Legacy ISA mode), and see which devices in your system are using DMA 05, and change them to a different DMA. Althow in the readme file it says that the card can use IRQ (3,4,5,9) and DMA (3,5,6,7), I tried using all the others and it didn't work, so I stuck to IRQ 05 dn DMA 05, and i freed them form usage of any devices. The next step I did was free up the I/O adresses starting with 300. The text file says that the I/O adress ranges star with 300,320,340 and 360, but here is what there is written lower in the same text file :
____________________

IF any board already uses range 300 to 317 (hexadecimal):

You must shut down the computer and remove that board before
installing the HP J2405A adapter into the computer, or it will not
be recognized to allow you to change the address range.

After you remove the board, then install the HP J2405A adapter
hardware.

View the configuration details. Change the I/O address range for
this adapter to the range starting with 320, 340, or 360 (to allow
the other board to use 300). Accept or change the values for the
interrupt and DMA channel. (See step 3 above for the allowed
resources.) Record these settings for later use.
____________________

Which means that the first I/O adress range the card requires for from the moter board starts with 300, so I had to free up that range. After I was shure that no device uses the range starting with 300 (I took me a while untill I was shure that range was free), I started installing driver after driver checking if any of the AMD drivers listed above will give any result (except for the AMD PCnet-Home Based Adapter which, as I wrote earlier, crashed the system). I installed the drivers randomly, without any order, hoping that i could somehow randomly find the matching one . Most of the drivers didn't even have assighed IRQ's or I/O ranges, so I had to assign them manualy (in the fields where there where supposed to be the numbers for the IRQ's DMA's and I/O ranges there where just questionmarks (?), hahahahaha). Finaly, I got to the last one:

AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter/ISA+ (Legacy Mode)

The installation of the driver finished and I set the IRQ to 05 and the I/O range to 0300-031F (the OS lets you choose the I/O range based on some predefined I/O ranges starting with 300, 320,... whatever, this was the I/O range that was predefined to start wit 300). Strangely enough, the driver didn't have assignments for DMA channels, don't know why... Anyway, for the first time (in so many driver installatins and uninstallations), Win2000 asked me to reboot the system so the cnages can take effect. I was stunned, so I rebooted and, as the French whould say, voila, IT WORKED .

But this only worked under Win2000, so I have to try it under XP too, in a few days (hopefully...), I would be writing a new post about XP (but let's not jinks the hole thing, I have my hopes up but not too high ).

So, if anyone has a HP PC LAN Adapter NC/16 TP (2100/1500T Compatible) and uses Win2000 Pro (i did this with SP4, I dont know if the other service packs have the same driver packs) and wants to use this old card here is what he/she should do:

1) If you have any other ISA or PCI cards installed on you system, remove them (temporarily ofecourse ).

2) Put the LAN card in the ISA/EISA slot of your moterboard.

3) Start the PC, press DEL to enter BIOS, go to the PNP/PCI Configuraton (or sometimes it's just PNP Configuration, depends on the version of the BIOS and the motherboard), set the "Resources Controlled By" option to Manual, set the IRQ-5 to Legacy ISA (in most cases by default is set to PCI/ISA (or PCI/ISA PnP, also depending on the version of the BIOS and the moterboard).

4) Start Win2000 and go to the Device Manager, the OS will probably recognize it as a Unknow Device in the Network Adapters section, right click on it and click Properties (or just double click it), go to the Drivers tab and click Update Driver.

5) The Upgrade Device Driver Wizard will start, just click Next. On the nex step of the wizard choose "Display a list of the known drivers for this device so that I can choose a specific driver", then click Next again. On the next step of the wizard choose "Show all hardware of this device class". Then, a list of manufacturers and their products (in this case network adapters) whil show up. Look for the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) manufacturer, and choose the AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter/ISA+ (Legacy Mode) product. Then just click next and the driver will install. A warning box might pop up saying that the driver is not compatible with your hardware (it worked for me ), so just click Yes and continue with the installation of the driver. Reboot the system, even if Win2000 doesn't asks you to (which probably will, but still...).

6) After rebooting, go to the Device Manager again and locate the Network Adapters section. The card under the Network Adapters section sould now read "AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter/ISA+ (Legacy Mode)", double click it and click on the Resources tab. In the Resource Settings window click (once) on the "Input/Otput Range" and then click the Change Settings button. In the Value field enter 0300-031F, and then click OK. In the Resource Settings window click (once) on the "Interrupt Request" and then click on the Change Settings button again. In the value field enter 05, and click OK. Click OK to the properties section of the Network Adapter (i.e. AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter/ISA+ (Legacy Mode)) and then close the Device Manager.

7) reboot Win2000, if everything went OK, the card should be up and running, and if there is no network cable plugged in the card there should be the little tray icon with the scratched computer monitors that indicates that there is no network cable plugged in (i.e. the PC is not connected to any network).

8) Shut down your PC, plug in your PCI and/or ISA devices (if you have any), and start the PC again. The devices shouldn't make any kind of a conflict now becauste the card is manually configured, so they wouldnt (dare ) take the cards resources.

Whell, thats it for now, I'll write again, hopefully with an instruction guide how to install this card on XP

[Judas]

you may be able to use windows 2000's driver packages by accessing them from windows xp to install.

good news though

[H3X4D3C1M4L]

Should have just installed OpenBSD or FreeBSD then you would have gotten it working in no time flat.

[GigaWatt]

Originally Posted by H3X4D3C1M4L

Should have just installed OpenBSD or FreeBSD then you would have gotten it working in no time flat.

Yeah, but it will take me like a year to learn how to work on BSD. Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm totlay against payable operating systems. Actually I have a virtual machine running Gentu Linux, almost all of the software I use is freeware or a Windows version of an application under Linux, but my opinion is: the most comonly used and most user friendly operating system in the world is Windows (Ubuntu is quite a competition, but I think Windows is still winning, maby in a copule of years... who knows ). Whisch is why I'm trying to enable the device to work under XP, so that other users wouldn't bother to install BSD or Linux, just so that they can one LAN card running and operational.

BTW, this is totally off topic, I know, so if the moderators think I should remove this reply, just PM me

PS: I don't wnt to sound like a newbie , but where is the avatar secttion in the user control panel, I can't seem to find it anywhere, there are all sorts of options there (some of them I haven't seen in any forum I've ever been a member to), but I just can't find the avatar section .

Thanks upfront

[GigaWatt]

Problem resolved

Sorry for the dealy, but the HDD on which i had WinXP SP2 installed died (for some reason the motor that rotated the disk wouldn't start), so I had to use a different drive to install XP all over again and test if could actually install the driver for this card.

I couldn't get the .inf file that configured the driver from Win2000 (on which as I said earlier, the card worked), so i just gogled around to find a Win2000 compatible driver for the AMD PCNET Family Ethernet Adapter/ISA+ (Legacy Mode) card. And I finaly did . Unlike HP, AMD is very supportive with their older products, this driver is actually intended for XP . So I installed the driver (loaded the .inf file - NETAMD.INF), made the aprppriate chages to the DMA, IRQ, and I/O Range (DMA: 05, IRQ: 05, I/O Range: 0300-031F), and on the next restart of XP, the card worked . Whereas in Win2000 there was no DMA channel assigned to the card, in XP there was, so I just assigned it as I described above.

I uploaded the driver allong with the installation instructions (I wroite them, AMD had an installation instruction set about their card) on driverguide.com, so I'm just going to paste the link:

Hewlett Packard (HP) HP PC LAN Adapter NC/16 TP (2100/1500T Compatible) Driver Summary

If anyone has a simular problem with this card, just download the driver from the link, and follow the instructions given with it. They are very detailed and specific .

PS: I don't know if I'm allowed to paste links in posts (on some forums it's forbiddent), so if it is, just PM me and I'll remove it.

PPS: Again, can someone please tell me where is the avatar section in the user control panel, I can't seem to find it anywhere, lol. Just PM me

PPPS: i uploaded the driver to a free permanent upload engine, the whole registration procedure on driverguide.com is kind of a hassle...

link: http://www.box.net/shared/hzs3zts7l3