Arch Linux

necbot

Member

Registered: 2013-12-05

Posts: 59

My WNDA3200 USB WIFI adapter is recognized as a mass storage device.

I have a Netgear WNDA3200 WIFI USB adapter that I'm trying to get working.  When I plug it in dmesg says...

[  373.191417] usb 2-4: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
[  373.323039] usb-storage 2-4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[  373.323132] scsi5 : usb-storage 2-4:1.0
[  374.327328] scsi 5:0:0:0: CD-ROM            Virtual  CDROM 0CF320FF   8765 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[  374.333072] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 50x/50x xa/form2 tray
[  374.334033] sr 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0

It detects it as a mass storage device.  I remember reading on openelec's wiki the following...

WNDA3200 is a Virgin branded version of the WNDA-3100. The card is a dual-mode device; it initially mounts as a CDROM that is "ejected" via a udev rule to switch the card into WLAN mode. Aside from this oddity the card performs well and is probably the cheapest dual-band 2.4/5GHz card you can buy....

So it appears that is it not recognized as a wifi usb card.  When I run lsmod | grep ath  I can see that ath9k and ath9k_htc are loaded.  How do I set up this udev rule to eject it?  Or is that even the correct solution?  Any ideas how to get this working?  Thanks.

EDIT:
I think I found my answer on the wiki.  I installed usb_modeswitch and everything appears to work fine.

Last edited by necbot (2013-12-27 19:44:59)

necbot

Member

Registered: 2013-12-05

Posts: 59

Re: My WNDA3200 USB WIFI adapter is recognized as a mass storage device.

Okay, usb_modeswitch works fine.  There is one odd quirk though...  Arch is set up so that it loads XBMC by default (I'm using this as a media PC).  On my old wifi adapter, which does not need modeswitch, the weather and news on XBMC update immediatly when it is started.  With this wifi adapter they do not update at all.  I can tolerate this though, but if anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this I'd appreciate it.  Thanks!