Bought myself a new wireless card for my HP ProBook 6560b laptop since I finally lost patience with the unstable and slow card that came pre-installed. I happily replaced the cards in the laptop and booted it up, only to be met by an ominous message saying
The system has detected that a Wireless module installed in the system is not supported and disabled it.
Wow, turns out that wireless card white listing is a thing and it is terribly annoying. Fortunately some site called “Milksnot” very gracefully offered a fairly simple work-around for the HP 4730s – and who wouldn’t trust a site called Milksnot.
Note, the solution as-is will not work for the 6560b but, since they both seem to have the same PCI controller, we can follow the same line of reasoning. In particular, the address to the FD register described in the 4730s work-around is the same. So using the GRUB command line we can examine the FD register value after booting with the original card versus with the new card.
Specifically, in the GRUB command line interface I ran
read_dword 0xfed1f418and GRUB told me 0x1ff01feb for the old card and 0x1ff81feb for the “unsupported” card. And putting
write_dword 0xfed1f418 0x1ff01febin my GRUB configuration did indeed make my OS recognize the card.
As far as I can tell, the only downside with this technique is that you still have to sit through the
The system has detected that a Wireless module installed in the system is not supported and disabled it.
page. I have decided not to be particularly annoyed with that and instead think of it as a reminder that perhaps HP is not the best choice for my next computer.
Clearly you apply this work-around at your own risk since it could potentially damage your computer!