NEC MobilePro 880 Suddenly Can't See PC/CF Cards

So, I was using my MobilePro 880 tonight, when all of a sudden, it lost access to its CF card slot (where I keep a 512MB card), and its PC card slot (a Hawking 10/100 NIC). Strangely, the Clik USB drivers were still working, and I was able to connect my 40GB hard drive and do a backup of the registry and databases with the bSquare software.

A soft reset didn't clear up the problem. Doing a hard reset did appear to clear up the problem....at first. After the hard reset, I could read my 512MB card with no problem. I'd transferred the backup to the CF card, run the backup and.....the CF card stopped reading again.

Now, the computer, it seems, knows there's something in the CF slot, because when it's on battery power, the "Do you want to use this card on battery power" prompt comes up.

As it stands, I've done a second hard reset, and am reinstalling everything manually, rather than doing a backup. But, what the heck happened? Has anyone had something like this happen before?

My z50 has done this to be before now. I have always had to fight it to get it to behave.

Let's be positive and assume this is a software problem, not a hardware one. I recommend that you hard reset again, let it cool off for a few hours with no power attached (and let you cool off also). Boot back up and don't perform a system restore cycle the cards in and out and see if it behaves. When you come to restore, if possible avoid restoring the registry. If you can't avoid that and it dies again, chances are your backup-set has a corruped system database(s) and / or RAM file(s).

Interesting that it worked until you ran the backup. Seems some file there is corrupting the slot possibly. Did you try another CF memory card and see if that one was recognized? What happened after C:Amie's suggestion?

Rich

Yep. I tried both my Toshiba 512 MB compact flash card, and my Toshiba 2 GB PC Card hard drive.

Well if neither of those drives worked as well, then some software change during the backup definitely sounds like the culprit.

Suggestion: hard reset your device, recalibrate and then perform full backup, including registry if using bUseful. Create a self-extracting backup file. The run it and see if the slot recognizes your card both before and after the backup. If so, then start adding programs and retest until you narrow down the culprit. May take you a bit more effort, but you will always have your previous backup to go from so you won't have to restart completely new every time.

Rich