3com Pci Network Card Driver

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Myra Krallman

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:02:10 PM8/3/24

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The problem:
I've got two 3COM Etherlink III ISA network cards (3509C-B and 3509B-TPO). I don't have any particular issues with these cards except when trying to configure them with 3COM's drivers. The 3509C-B (RJ45 / AUI / BNC combo ports) hard-locks DOS whenever I try to test the card, or make changes to the IRQ / DMA through the 3COM test/configuration program. I tried to resolve this problem by bypassing MS-DOS start-up files, which didn't help.

Swapped out the 3509C-B card with the 3509C-TPO (RJ-45 only) card, but again it hardlocked when I tried to configure the card after normal boot into MS-DOS. Rebooting and bypassing the MS-DOS start-up files made it possible to configure and test the card without a problem.

However...
Both cards prevent Windows for Workgroups from loading (hangs at the splash screen) after I install the drivers, or use the driver that comes with Windows. I've already looked for possible IRQ and DMA conflicts. There aren't.

Funny, I had exactly the same issue with my NIC 3c509B. On my 486 it would prevent WfW3.11 from loading, and in Windows 95 would crash when I hit the 'Test' button. I just moved it to my Pentium (socket 7) machine, and WfW3.11 now loads but the NIC doesn't work, and in Windows 95 it still hard crashes when I hit test. Fortunately, it works in Windows 95 otherwise! Maybe it's not your system as I had the same trouble..

Funny you should say that, but that is exactly what I was thinking as well. I have it set up for DHCP, but I haven't connected it to the switch just yet. I'll give that a shot later and see if that solves the problem.

You have a more serious resource allocation issue on this system, nevertheless.
If the 3com card can correctly update and store its configuration data "once upon a boot time" but not next time, you might have another device at the same port address. I would re-Check with a bare bone system, using a different multi I/O card.

Thank you. I thought it might have been a resource conflict as well, but I checked all available IRQs and addresses via MSD and nothing was conflicting. I had to bypass MS-DOS startup files to test / configure the card.

So, I had this exact same problem of computer hanging or crashing when using the provided 3Com drivers, and this post got me in the right direction, although the actual solution is never stated anywhere.

In my case I was running the auto-config option of the 3com setup program when trying to set up the resource parameters, and it always said it saved the new values to the card, but clearly it didn't since running the crynwyr packet driver would show different resources from the ones supposedly set by auto-config, while running the official packet driver would just hang. Jolaes76 was right in regards to there being a resource allocation issue.

The key to solving the issue was turning off "plug & play" in the 3Com config program, rebooting and then setting the resources automatically again. This time they were actually saved to the card and there were definitely no conflicts.

You can scan for driver updates automatically and install them manually with the free version of the 3Com Network / Ethernet Driver Update Utility, or complete all necessary driver updates automatically using the premium version.

Click the Update button next to your driver. The correct version will be downloaded and installed automatically. Or, you can click the Update All button at the bottom to automatically download and install the correct version of all the drivers that are missing or out-of-date on your system.

To find the latest driver, including Windows 11 drivers, choose from our list of most popular 3Com Network / Ethernet downloads or search our driver archive for the driver that fits your specific 3Com network / ethernet model and your PC's operating system.

After downloading your driver update, you will need to install it. Driver updates come in a variety of file formats with different file extensions. For example, you may have downloaded an EXE, INF, ZIP, or SYS file. Each file type has a slightly different installation procedure to follow. Visit our Driver Support Page to watch helpful step-by-step videos on how to install drivers based on their file extension.

I'm just trying to get TCP/IP working from my router to this Windows 3.11 PC. I've done a fresh install of DOS 6.22. Followed up with a fresh install of Windows 3.11. I then copied over and extracted the 3Com drivers and TCPIP32B update. I then clicked on Network Setup-Install Microsoft Windows Network-No Additional network-Clicked on Network Drivers-Add Adapter-point it to the 3Com WIN311 drivers-Clicked Add Protocol-Point it to TCPIP32B-everything installs-enabled DHCP server and made TCP/IP the only protocol so default and Windows restarts PC. When Windows 3.11 boots back up it tells me: The Windows for Workgroups Network was not started. Check your configuration, or run Setup again to set up Windows for Workgroups properly.

Fortunately, the virtual switch in a hypervisor has the ability to buffer packets, and packet loss is far less of a problem in a VM. Which is not to say the emulated EtherLink is some kind of a great performer, but it can certainly handle much more than 10Mbps.

Besides the pre-release NetWare OS/2 Requester and Linux, is there any other networking software a 3C501 can work with? Yes, more or less every Ethernet-capable networking package from the late 1980s comes with 3C501 drivers, and nearly everything from the early 1990s either comes with a 3C501 driver or can have one added.

Old SCO networking packages only support the 3C501 and WD8003 NICs out of the box. Over time, support for other adapters was added (primarily newer 3Com cards) but 3C501 support survived until modern installable drivers became available. Other UNIX System V derivatives for the 386 also tended to have 3C501 drivers.

The 3C500 (IE) was also nearly identical to the newer 3C501 (IE-4), and software written for the 3C500 should work on a 3C501. How do I know the IE and IE-4 are almost the same? Because their technical references are nearly identical, word for word.

The 3C500 is so old that finding any information about it (besides that technical reference) is nearly impossible. My current assumption is that the biggest difference between IE and IE-4 is that the latter replaced a large number of discrete chips with a custom ASIC.

The EtherLink is built around the SEEQ 8001 EDLC (Ethernet Data Link Controller) which handles all Ethernet specifics. 3Com added a 2KB packet buffer and circuitry required for interfacing the EDLC with an IBM PC. The SEEQ 8001 appears to have been developed by SEEQ for and with 3Com; both companies were linked through Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Several minor implementation details were worked out only after examining a real EtherLink card. For example, the 3Com documentation claims that the receive buffer pointer is reset by writing to its low byte. Yet nearly all drivers write a zero to the LSB and MSB of the receive buffer pointer, treating it the same as the GP (General Purpose) buffer pointer. Examining actual hardware confirmed that the documentation is correct, and writing anything to the low byte of the receive buffer pointer zeroes all 16 bits of it. Which means that those drivers just waste time writing to an unused register.

As mentioned above, I do have a real EtherLink card to test with. Given that the card itself was made in 1986, and the Ethernet chip is a circa 1982 design, one might wonder if it actually works in a modern network at all.

That is to say, all the warnings about the 3C501 being awful made 25 years ago are just as true today, and probably more so. But the antique design and a nearly 35 year old card is still perfectly capable of sending and receiving Ethernet traffic on a modern network. Just not very quickly.

The 3C500 was a major cost reduction compared to the 3C200 and 3C300 which were priced on the order of $2,000 and $3,000 respectively. Note that different magazines listed different prices. Those were for the PDP-11 Q-Bus and Unibus. The transceiver portion of the 3C500 looks very similar; the major change beyond swapping the bus interface was reducing the RAM from 32k to 2k. Since the manuals indicated that only 4 buffers (8k) were needed in all but the most extreme workloads, the PDP cards were overkill. The reviews a few years later indicated that the 8k for buffers on the 3c503 gave little benefit over the 2k in the 3C501, certainly not enough to be worth paying an extra $150 for the privilege.

Yes. Note that the 3C500 in the photo is from 1985, 3 years after the initial release, when 3Com was selling hardware in decent numbers. It is also possible that the minicomputer variants were simply priced higher because customers were willing to pay more, not because they were more expensive to build.

Conversely, the size of the full featured 3Com ethernet cards can be seen at -2 Go down a bunch and scroll the picture list to the right and there is a picture of the 3C400, the Multibus variation. Makes it easy to see how much 3Com had to remove from the card to meet the smaller size of ISA.

Without a 3Server machine it should be possible to serve via LAN Manager with NBP/XNS protocols activated. For later LM versions the XNS protocol stack was still available on an optional diskette. The documentation for EtherShare/EtherSeries (scans available through bitsavers) contains some information about the EtherLink card revisions. Assembly Number 0345 and 34-0780 for the long sized and 1221 for the half sized (that should fit to the image here) were mentioned.