Blacklisting a HARDWARE device?

[John Aldrich]

On Wednesday 21 November 2007, Kelly Miller wrote:
> Okay, here's the situation; after fiddling and fiddling and fiddling
> with this stupid wireless network card in this laptop (AR5007EG), I went
> out and bought a PCMCIA card to replace it (AR5212).  The problem I'm
> currently having is that since both hardware devices have Atheros
> chipsets, they both want to claim the ath5k/madwifi driver (depending on
> which I try to use).  Is there any way short of ripping out the hardware
> I can tell Fedora to ignore the former completely, and act as if it
> wasn't even plugged in at all, so I can get the driver to work with the
> latter?  At this point, the former is sending goofy error messages which
> the system seems to be confusing with the messages sent by the latter,
> causing all sorts of problems...
>
Can you not go into BIOS and disable it? Most systems I've seen give you an 
option of disabling built-in hardware in the bios.