Trying to work around IBM bios whitelist to upgrade the WWAN card

From Foomagic

As they have done with wireless cards, IBM have locked their users into which WWAN cards they are allowed to put in their laptops. This is extremely frustrating, and has made me to decide not to buy another thinkpad. Some background on the wireless lock-in can be found in the following links.

http://www.paul.sladen.org/thinkpad-r31/wifi-card-pci-ids.html

http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~mjg59/thinkpad/background.html

My T60p came with a mc8755 sierra wireless card. This works quite well but the major telco here in Australia has decided to deploy its HSPDA network on the 850MHz band. This band is supported by the mc8775 sierra card but this card doesn't even appear in the approved list of parts for my model. So even if I was willing to spend three times the amount for an approved IBM fru, I am unable to upgrade my laptop. This is pretty poor for a laptop that has a three year guarantee. When you have a guarentee you generally decide to keep things for that period, but now I am stuck with being unable to upgrade bits inside my laptop even though there is no good reason why I can't, except IBM's bad business practise of consumer lock-in.

The sierra mc8775 mini-pcie card is available from several places, but its also inside the 875u usb modem. A quick search on ebay located a 875u at a reasonable price, and also unlocked. Now I just need to get the bios to let it work. Unlike most people that plug in unauthorised cards, I do not get the 1804 bios error, but the bios seems to disable the card. During post and slightly into kernel load, the WAN light is on, but goes out early in the boot process, and thereafter the kernel is unable to detect the hardware. A couple of people have gotten their 80211 cards working by hotplugging them into the box after post, but before the OS loads. I tried this with the WAN card but as soon as I plugged the mc8775 in, the screen blanked. This made my heart stop momentarily as I thought I had fried the motherboard. After removing the card and rebooting, all was well, so I decided to try again. :) Once again the screen blanked, and I couldn't get the thing to boot. Interestingly though the WAN light stayed lit, so I am fairly confident that if I can change the product id of the card I may be able to get the bios to accept it and the card to work. Hopefully there will not even need to be any kernel driver hacks, as the same module supports the 8755 and 8775 and I am guessing the firmware looks after the radio bands etc.

So far I haven't had much luck finding a tool to edit the product id, ethtool is available for network cards, but it will not work on the sierra card. There are a few tools and patches around for various preipherals, so hopefully I will be able to adapt one of these to get around the bios check.

I was hoping that one of the few eeprom tools around would be able to edit the eeprom data. I have no idea whats actually inside the card apart from a MSM6280 chip from qualcomm. The plate that covers the entire card is soldered on, so looking at what else is inside is going to be a bit difficult. Tried the tools that come with the lm-sensors package, but the card doesn't appear on the i2c bus, so they weren't helpfull.

Have temporarily put this on hold, as I am now trying to work around the check by changing the id's in the bios. My trial at this can be found here.

Will update as I find information. If you have ideas or sugestions, email me here on shorty_at_foomagic.org.