Mark Knecht wrote: > > > On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 12:09 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com > <mailto:rdalek1...@gmail.com>> wrote: > > > <SNIP> > > First, I thought cards were backward compatible? You could stick a 3.0 > > into a 2.0 slot and it would just run as a 2.0 and vice versa. I know > > the mobo is 2.0. It does recognize the drive but seems to nuke the > > ethernet somehow. I looked, there is no switches on the card. I don't > > see a way to adjust how it works or anything. > > > <SNIP> > > You've gotten a number of good answers so I won't duplicate any > of that, but as someone who worked designing PCI and PCI Express > hardware I make a couple of observations: > > 1) A hardware spec can be backward compatible but if BIOS > doesn't, or didn't at the time, do everything correctly, then a > PCI Express chip mounted on an adapter card and misprogrammed > by BIOS can cause a lot of problems. > > 2) To me, this problem smells of the sort of thing we used to > see when BIOS (or potentially the OS) didn't handle PCI > Bridges correctly. > > The way a lot of this Wide PCI Express to multiple slow > interfaces work is by embedding a PCI Express Bridge > inside the chip and then branching out to independant > PCI Express (or just PCI) narrow devices inside the chip > and behind the bridge. > > You can see a representation of this stuff using the > commands: > > lspci > lspci -t -v (or -vvv) > > The numbers you see are the PCI device number BIOS > has given each device. If a device number has a dot > something value then these are subdevices inside the > chip. When you see the depth getting large and you > start to see sub-busses you are actually getting there > through a bridge. > > The problem is a lot of old BIOS's didn't handle bridges > correctly, and a lot of bridges didn't work correctly, and > the PCI Bridge specs were changing along the way. > > If you look at the tree structure with the card out and card > in the machine then you may find out that there is a > problem, such as the network controller not showing up. > > As the network controller is likely in the motherboard > chipset it is possible that a PCI Express network adapter > will do better, but that's sort of hunt and peck. > > Best wishes, good luck and happy hunting, > Mark
You could be right. I did find one interesting post in my google search, one person updated their BIOS and fixed the issue. Pretty sure mine is up to date. Given the age of the mobo, I doubt they even think of releasing a new BIOS for that old thing. Anyway, I found a card with a Marvel chip instead of ASMedia. It also says in the description that it is PCIe v2.0. I'm hoping it will work. I need to read up more on lspci. I mostly use the -k option to show kernel drivers in use for each chip thing. I've never used the -t option. Gonna go play with that a bit. Dale :-) :-) P. S. I had started saving up for my new rig again. Tank on my toilet cracked and started leaking. Pardon the pun, the money I had saved up, got flushed. :-( Got a new toilet tho. I keep playing with the lid. It closes itself. O_O
