X40 - USB Blues

[sicelo]

Hi
I have received an X40 as a gift. Unfortunately, the USB ports are not working, which appears to have been a common problem with the X40.

What I wish to find out is - if i purchase a cardbus USB card, can the X40 boot off it to install an operating system? I know for example it cannot boot off the SD card (which works).

Or does the BIOS handle PCMCIA USB differently, and therefore be unable to boot from it?

[Neil]

USB is dead in my X40 too so I use a PCMCIA card. No..try as I might, it won't boot from the add on card.

[dr_st]

CardBus! You're using CardBus! (PCMCIA is the old slow 16-bit variant of the same form factor).

And no, it won't boot from that. You have to add special support in the BIOS for each individual controller to be able to boot from it. I haven't seen a Thinkpad that had BIOS support for booting from anything CardBus.

[axur-delmeria]

Plop Boot Manager states that it supports booting from Cardbus USB cards: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/pcmcia.html.

Note that I haven't tried this, so I don't know if it will work or not.

[sicelo]

Thank you all for your replies.
I will buy the card for regular USB usage, and install Linux in another way (e.g. TFTP or move HDD across)

[sicelo]

Just as a follow-up:
- I did get the add-on USB Cardbus card for general USB use. Works very well
- Took out the 60GB SSD in the X40 hoping to install Linux on it while connected to an adapter. Eventually scrapped this plan as I was not too sure about voltage levels of the SSD (3.3V?) and the adapter (5V?)
- Decided to set up TFTP boot, and this worked awesomely.

So the X40 currently runs Debian 8/Jessie. Gnome3 works just well on it, although there is one nasty bug (Debian Bug #770130 & 776911) which can be work-arounded. KDE4 also works fine and is what I'm currently on.

[teamde78]

Just as a follow-up:
- I did get the add-on USB Cardbus card for general USB use. Works very well
- Took out the 60GB SSD in the X40 hoping to install Linux on it while connected to an adapter. Eventually scrapped this plan as I was not too sure about voltage levels of the SSD (3.3V?) and the adapter (5V?)
- Decided to set up TFTP boot, and this worked awesomely.

So the X40 currently runs Debian 8/Jessie. Gnome3 works just well on it, although there is one nasty bug (Debian Bug #770130 & 776911) which can be work-arounded. KDE4 also works fine and is what I'm currently on.

Glad it is working for you. My X40 had similar issues last year, and I ended up not trying to fix it. I may just try to now and see if I can get a work around to those pesky USB problems.