Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:37:38 +0100
From: Alberto Venturini <>
To: jsun@junsun.net
Subject: Flashing an intersil-prism card (D-Link DRC-650): success!

Hello,
I want to report my successful upgrade of a D-Link DRC-650 firmware.

The card is a D-Link DRC-650 pc-card, AKA D-Link "NetEasy" (NIC:
id=0x8008 v1.0.1). This card had a very outdated firmware (version
0.8.3): it was correctly identified by the hostap driver under Linux,
but wpa_supplicant was not working (wpa_supplicant failed with an ioctl
[] error). I wanted to get it working in a WPA-PSK network, so I had to
upgrade.

Here's what I did:
- I recompiled the hostap driver, enabling PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT and
PRISM2_NON_VOLATILE_DOWNLOAD;
- patched the prism2_srec utility (as suggested in another "success
story"): this is necessary because prism2_srec refuses to write the
firmware on this card, even if it's known to work. I simply commented
the following lines (lines 1156-1157) in prism2_srec.c:

if (dl_mode == MODE_NON_VOLATILE)
        return 0;

- I downloaded the firmware file s1010701.hex (firmware version 1.7.1)
- ./prism2_srec -v -f wlan0 s1010701.hex

The upgrade was successful, and now wpa_supplicant is working :)

Thank you very much for your "mini-HOWTO" page, it was very helpful!
If you are going to publish this report on your website, please hide my
email address. Thank you!

Bye,
Alberto Venturini