P2 Cardbus drivers - can someone confirm?

Noel Evans

Noel Evans

Mod V3 New and Improved
Staff member
I received a repaired laptop back and had to reinstall p2 card bus drivers.

I downloaded the p2 drivers. Placed card in adapter, placed it into cardbus (this is win xp and Ive done this same thing a number of times in the past).

Anyway when the drivers are installing a screen comes up and tells me to choose a device. Unlike previous there was no cardbus to select. Nothing I downloaded had cardbus as an option. Now if you dont make a selection the p2 driver install cancels.

Very frustrated after two hours I went upstairs and dug out an old (in japanese) winxp laptop with a PCMCIA slot. This had never had p2 drivers installed.

I placed the card in the slot - downloaded drivers - installed drivers, screen pops up in Japanese and blamo there it is at the very top - cardbus drivers. Installed those, restart, worked.

Now there are NO japanese or english drivers seperate. They are on the one download. Your win installer recognises correct language to choose.

So the cardbus drivers are there, but the option only shows on the japanese version.

Can someone download the p2 drivers - someone with a 32bit machine - and start the install until the choose device pop up comes up and tell me if it shows the cardbus option please.

I have a feeling its been missed.
 
Hi Noel,

you described "Anyway when the drivers are installing a screen comes up and tells me to choose a device"
Is it possible that your repaired Lappy has been fitted with a wrong PC card reader ? not one that is Cardbus ie 32bit....as far as I know 16 bit reader won't install a Cardbus driver.. correct me if I'm wrong.

maybe worth checking out...seems like you have done everything else correctly...

Cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au
 
Last edited:
Cheers Tom... theres some issues with the clean install they did, so quite possibly. Its going back tomorrow.

Lucky I have the old backup.
 
my first guess is that you may need the driver for your specific model of pcmcia hardware

man, this is my biggest beef with the whole windows experience.

i wanted to get rid of all the bloatware so i erased the hard drive of my new firebreathing HP laptop when i got it home. after installing a clean windows XP pro i had to spend literally a day tracking down drivers for all the components of their build model dujour. just to get core function like sound and pcmcia connectivity...

GRRR!
 
Just went through this today, in fact. New laptop, Windows 7, and no PCMCIA slot so I'm using my Rosewill/Addonics external ExpressCard->PCMCIA adapter.

Plug in the Rosewill, and it installs a bit of software to make a PCI->PCI bridge. Plug in a P2 card and it comes up with an error on a failed install of a Mass Storage Controller.

Downloaded the 64-bit Windows 7 version of the P2 driver and no, the cardbus slot driver is not an option. It just isn't listed, whether I run it with the adapter in or not, and/or with a P2 card in the adapter or not. But, apparently, that's okay, because I found these excellent videos from Addonics which show step-by-step exactly how to install the drivers anyway.

http://www.addonics.com/support/download/video/ADEXC34CB-01.avi
http://www.addonics.com/support/download/video/ADEXC34CB-02.avi

Following those instructions, I right-clicked on the ? Mass Storage Controller device, told it to "update driver", went to the p2cache file in the driver directory, and bam - the P2 card is now installed and working fine.

Don't know if that will help in your particular circumstance, but it's the process I had to go through.
 
Barry,

I have the Addonics PCI internal card that allows for PCMCIA/CardBus reading. My problem is that Windows 7 doesn't make the P2 card a "hard drive". When I install the Panasonic Windows driver package (win64_p2driver_v215)... everything works great... I see the P2 card as "a logical hard drive" with an assigned drive letter... the problem is that I have to "restart my computer".... after the restart... Windows 7 doesn't see the P2 card!

Following your instructions in the above thread and after the restart I notice these changes:
1. The Addonics card is now seen (in the Device Manager) as a "PCMCIA Adaptor", "Ricoh R/RL/RT/5C475(II), R5C520 or Compatiable CardBus Controller" (all drivers loaded and working properly)
2. The P2 card is no longer seen as a "mass storage controller", but as "Unknown", "P2 Card Series Cached Disk" (all drivers loaded and working properly)
3. In the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" section, there is a sub account for "Panasonic P2 card" (all drivers loaded and working properly)
4. But there is NO listing under the "Disk drives" section tree for a P2 card.

Any thoughts? Why would the installer package work fine up until the reboot?

Thanks for any help.
 
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