ath0: unable to attach hardware

[husyh at hush.com]

Sorry, it seems like the newlines and paragraphs didn't work out as intended. I hope this is more readable now:

Hello,

I'm new to FreeBSD. I decided to install 9.0-RELEASE (amd64) on a machine I have been given, which has a PCI WLAN card installed.
After booting the newly installed system, I ran ifconfig, which however only shows fxp0, plip0 and lo0.
I tried to google for users with similar problems and follow suggestions made by others in hopes to fix the problem. In the process, I compiled a new kernel with AH_DEBUG and ATH_DEBUG and created /boot/loader.conf with the two following lines:
hw.ath.debug=1
hw.ath.hal.debug=1

Since I do not have a network connection of the affected machine, I will only type in the part of the dmesg output which I guess could be relevant. If you want, I could try to find a USB drive or something similar to post the whole dmesg output.

ath0: <Atheros 5413> mem 0xfdee0000-0xfdeeffff irq 16 at device 4.0 on pci2
ar5212ChipTest: address test failed addr: 0x00008000 - wr:0x00000000 != rd:0xffffffff
ar5212Attach: hardware self-test failed
ath0: unable to attach hardware; HAL status 14
device_attach: ath0 attach returned 6

I tried a Ubuntu live-CD, which recognised the WLAN card and allowed me to connect to my network and browse the web.

I don't know what I could do to solve this issue. I'm willing to try various things, especially since this machine is not in any way in productive use right now (and there is no valuable data stored either.)

Being quite proficient in C and C++, I wouldn't mind if your suggestions involved me looking at some code and modifying it in some places. However, please keep in mind that, since I'm a new FreeBSD user, I'm have no idea about the inner workings of the FreeBSD code (although I had brief look at the ath sources prior to writing this mail.) Also, I don't know anything about programming hardware, and I don't know much about IEEE 802.11 either.

I would be very thankful for all kinds of input. Please let me know if you need further information.