Changing subsystem ID for ipw2200/2915 cards

Warning

The steps described here could result in damaging your card, loosing warranty, breaking FCC regulations, or whatever. This is at your risk.

What we are going to do

Some evil laptop manufactors place a check in BIOS that only ipw cards with their sticker would work. But, their sticker seems to be very costly. It seems the only difference between the intel(R) card and their card is the PCI Subsystem ID. This is stored in the card's EEPROM, and we're going change that.

Stuff you need

• the ipw minipci card, of course
• a machine that boots that card (you can use a notebook without whitelist, or a desktop pc with miniPCI to PCI adaptor, which is cheap) running Linux
• ipw2200 driver sources, from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net
• my patch that adds functionality to write to the EEPROM
• a newer version of ethtool (with -E functionality) http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/

The steps

• unpack ipw2200 sources
• apply the patch
• compile and install ipw2200 driver according to the readme
• you may need a reboot
• keep a backup copy of the card's EEPROM in case something goes wrong:
  #ethtool -e ethX > eeprom-dump.txt
• now, find out what the correct subsystem for your vendor ID should be. Someone with an approved card could help you, or you can find it in Windoze driver's .inf file.
• Mine card had to be HP's 2915ABG European version, so I executed the following commands:
  

  # 0x1352 is HP code for 2915ABG, European version
  ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0x52
  ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x13
  # 0x103c is HP
  ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0x3c
  ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x10
  

• At this point, I turned off the machine, pulled out the card, inserted it in the notebook, and, whoa, no "104" message, wireless button works,....

What to do next

Give your notebook manufacturer a call and demand disabling the whitelist. If they won't, stop buying anything from them. This hack may solve this for now, but what about non-Intel cards or future Intel cards? And if they start with miniPCI, this could extend to anything other. We should be allowed to do what we want with our laptops

Thanks