PCMCIA CardBus driver - USB PC-Card

Many old laptops are having one or two CardBus slots. The boot manager can act as USB PC-Card enabler and the boot manager makes it possible to boot from the USB PC-Card. When your laptop has only USB 1.1, then you can speed up the boot process with an USB 2.0 PC-Card. When your laptop has only one USB port, then you are able to get more USB ports with an USB PC-Card.

You find the boot manager with the CardBus driver in the pcmcia directory of plpbt-5.0.15.zip.

The boot manager initializes the CardBus during the boot manager startup. This means, the PC-Card must be plugged in during the boot manager start! I do this during the program start, because then you have an initialized and ready to use PC-Card regardless if you boot from usb or not. When you have a DOS USB driver (for OHCI and EHCI) then you are able to use it with the PC-Card and you don't need a extra CardBus driver.

During the boot manager startup you will see some infos about the CardBus init process. When you want to read it, then press the CTRL key during the boot manager start.

Notes:

• My CardBus driver works on many machines, but it does not work on all.

• Because of the additional CardBus driver size, I had to remove the IDE Cdrom driver (only) from the pcmcia hard disk boot manager version.
  plpbt.bin has all drivers included.

© 2024 by Elmar Hanlhofer