[TWILL]

I need some help everyone before my hair completely falls out.

I was tring to help a friend with his Compaq Presario 2145 laptop. He wanted to do a fresh install of winXP (we tried XP Pro and Home) , so we used the XP Home disk that came with the system and after it installed the external switch for the Lan-Express will not work. This switch allows you to turn on or off the wireless card and it has a small blue light that indicates data communication and power. Ive downloaded the drivers and everything and still no luck.

The LAN card actually works fine, just the external power button and light doesnt work. I can turn it off with software.

I then did a system restore with the system restore disk and it started working. However, we dont want to restore the system like this because it adds in all of the other crap software we dont want.

Summary: light works if using a restore disk but will not work if just using a windowsXP disk to install OS.

So anyone have any ideas?

Is there anything I can copy to disk from the working restore over to the just XP version?

thanks
TWILL

[kenkueh]

I'm not really understand what u have written. is it just the light not working? or your LAN card not working??? Besides that, how u connect the LAN card to ur notebook? USB? PCMCIA? From what u have written, i'm very blur...

[IcemanND]

I believe you have to have the hotkey software installed in order for this button, and the other non standard buttons to work properly.

[FthrJACK]

Check your hard disk for hidden partitions, there is probably a hidden partition full of files including drivers. hopefully the drivers/software for the hardware is in a nice labeled folder and you will be able to grab it and put it on CD.

Just unhide the drive using Partition magic or some other disk manager (you can hide or unhide drives in the registry too) then browse in and get what you are after.

You could always burn the whole lot to disks and remove the partition freeing up anything from a few gig to about 10gb depending on what size the partition is..

gl!

[TWILL]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

@kenkueh - yes the card worked fine the external light and external button to turn the lan card on and off wouldnt work.

I finally got it to work. IcemanND was correct it, did need the hotkey software installed. For some reason though it didnt work if I installed the hotkey software manually. I finally just put in into the unattended install of XP and it worked great.

FthrJACK thanks for the tip too, although I already have it fixed I might explore and tinker with some of the stuff you suggested. You never know what you might find.

thanks again...

TWILL