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Troubleshooting NT 4.0 Installations

This document cover the following products:
Aircard 300 and Aircard 350

Symptoms

1. Red LED on card does not come on.
2. Card does not respond to Watcher, Wireless Expert or Wireless Toolkit.
3. Machine hangs on boot up.

Resolution

Service Pack 4 for NT (or higher) is required to run the Aircard 300 with Windows NT (The latest version of the service pack can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com). Some machines may also require the use of a third party card services software which is often available at the laptop vendor?s website at no charge.

The most common trouble with the installation of devices under the NT operating system is the mis-assignment of IRQs and IO address spaces by the operating system. The utility WINMSD.EXE will display a list of available resources but there are circumstances under which this utility will misreport the available resources. To change the resources used by the Aircard 300 perform the following steps:

1. If the machine hangs on boot up, remove the card before starting the machine.
2. Check to make sure that Service Pack 4 or higher is in use. This can be found in Start->Settings->Control Panel->Add/ RemovePrograms. The Service Pack will appear in the list of installed packages.
3. Run WINMSD.EXE and make a note of the available IRQs and IO address spaces.
4. Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel and open the Network control panel, click on the Protocols tab, select TCPIP and select Properties. Make sure that Obtain an IP address from a DHCP server is selected.
5. Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel and open the Network control panel applet. Highlight the Sierra Wireless Aircard 300 PCMCIA Adapter and click on Properties .
6. Click on the Hardware Resources tab. Try changing the IO address first and then the IRQ to one of the available address resources found in step 3. (Note that you must reboot in order for the new settings to take effect.)
7. If the red LED illuminates then a valid IO address is typically being used. Run Watcher. If Watcher starts and is scanning channels then typically a valid IRQ has been selected.

Note : You must run Wireless Expert at least once with a new card to program the NEI.

Last update: September 6, 2000 - JRF
Reviewed: September 6, 2000 - KC