Removing Wireless device driver

[RET423]

I hope this is the right section to ask this.
I have a TP-Link wireless N mini pci card in my laptop (A-31 IBM), when I installed pclinuos2007 the installer asked me for the windows drivers to use ndiswrapper and the card worked great, it was stable and fast.

When I upgraded the hard drive I decided to install pclinuxos2009 since I was starting over anyway, I found that the 2009 version of pclinuxos has an embedded driver for my card (ath_pci) so it does not use ndiswrapper.

The problem is that the embedded driver does not work as well as the xp driver (through ndiswrapper) worked. The connection is erratic and sometimes it won't connect at all.

I tried using the control panel to change the driver to "a windows driver using ndiswrapper" and the wizard asks "are you sure you want to do this?", when I click "yes" the system freezes up solid. It requires a hard reboot and when it comes back up it still has the embedded driver.

I think what I need to do is remove the driver (and get the embedded driver off the drive entirely) and then restart the machine and use ndiswrapper. I just don't know how to "uninstall" the driver from the device and then remove it from the drive so it won't automatically reinstall it at the next boot.

In Windows this would be pretty easy but I have had a hard time finding out how to accomplish this in Linux. The laptop is a duel boot with XP-Pro so I can use it until I figure this out but I really miss my Linux, I did not realize how heavily I used the Linux OS until I did not have the option. I replaced this drive on Super Bowl Sunday so I have struggling with this for awhile now, any help would be much appreciated!

Is there a procedure someone could explain to a newbie like me to accomplish this? I really like pclinuxos2009 and I would hate to go back to 2007 just to stabilize my wireless card.

[Joble]

With root privileges you can open
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
and add
blacklist ath_pci
save exit reboot.  The blacklist file will keep that driver from loading.  Then just set up your ndiswrapper like you did before.

Hope that helps.

Welcome to the Forums!

[RET423]

Great! I will give that a try this evening.

Thank you very much.