Reviving A Pentium II: NIC Card Woes

gurran · 03-10-2016, 02:10 AM

OK, so I have this wonderful piece of ancient hardware and I'm restoring it. So I got some scavenged parts...

Asus P2B Motherboard
Pentium II Processor
3x 128MB RAM DIMM sticks
StarTech 5.1Ch Audio Card
Nvidia GeForce2 MX/MX 400 (rev b2) - known thanks to lspci
Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) - known thanks to lspci

Along with the other necessities... IDE hard drive, IDE CD ROM, and a good ole floppy drive.

Good news? Boots to the antiX live CD like a charm!
Bad news? NIC card only shows in lspci...

So doing some research, I thought maybe it was a problem with IRQs. That theory is yet to be confirmed. However I finally managed to get something [possibly] useful from dmesg! After trying to look for anything "net" or "eth" related using

Code:

dmesg | grep -i -e net -e eth

and coming up empty handed, I tried using the PCI number I found through lspci: "09.0" and found an error that seems to lead to bug reports that get me nowhere:

Code:

[  0.098449] pci 0000:00:09.0: [10ec:0139] type 00 class 0x020000
[  0.098495] pci 0000:00:09.0: reg 0x10: [io 0xd000-0xd0ff]
[  0.098522] pci 0000:00:09.0: [Firmware Bug]: reg 0x14: invalid BAR (can't size)
[  0.098652] pci 0000:00:09.0: supports D1 D2
[  0.098670] pci 0000:00:09.0: PME# supported from D3hot

As you can probably tell the thing that caught my eye was the "Firmware Bug" line. So I hope someone will be able to decipher this [seemingly] cryptic error. Thanks.

Sincerely,
Patrick

smallpond · 03-10-2016, 08:28 AM

What kernel version are you running?

gurran · 03-10-2016, 09:14 AM

I don't remember the exact version, but it was 4.x range. I'll edit this post with the exact version in a few minutes. The distro I'm using (antiX) is based off of Debian Sid with a few optimizations for antique PCs.

rokytnji · 03-10-2016, 12:26 PM

Post

Code:

inxi -Fxz

so we can see your hardware in code tags . It will show your kernel and wireless chip.

ardvark71 · 03-10-2016, 12:38 PM

Hi gurran...

Welcome to the forum

If inxi is not installed, you can use this command...

Code:

lspci -nnk | grep -i net -A2

Regards...

jefro · 03-10-2016, 03:02 PM

Some questions.

Any ISA slots in this?

Can you move the nic card to a new slot or is it onboard?

Isn't there a bios thing about resetting pci ???

gurran · 03-11-2016, 02:54 PM

Sorry for the late replies. I've been busy. I did not want to manually type this and there was no way for me to get a text file to/fro this antique, so I apologize for the format... https://imgur.com/s6oPzOb

@jefro I apologize for my ignorance, but what is an ISA slot? I've tried it on the 2 available PCI slots. Same result. However I did find the DOS driver floppy if it helps! Lol XD

jefro · 03-11-2016, 03:09 PM

You suggested that there may be an irq,dma sort of thing going on. Boards with ISA are almost gone except in commercial uses. ISA (EISA) is the slot two versions before PCI. I count Microchannel in there.

So, if you did have an ISA it would be more likely that the board didn't allocate resources correctly. Generally PCI boards do a good job managing irq and memory and such.

gurran · 03-11-2016, 04:07 PM

I saw 3 unidentified expansion slots, but had no need for them so I didn't look it up. So I just looked it up and it has 4 PCI slots and 3 ISA slots (being the unidentified slots), as well as the "accelerated graphics" port. So the answer to your question is yes, it does has ISA slots.

michaelk · 03-11-2016, 04:19 PM

I would try loading the module just to see what happens:
modprobe 8139too

gurran · 03-11-2016, 04:21 PM

Unfortunately that didn't work... Google told me to try that. :-/

ardvark71 · 03-11-2016, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gurran

Sorry for the late replies. I've been busy. I did not want to manually type this and there was no way for me to get a text file to/fro this antique, so I apologize for the format... https://imgur.com/s6oPzOb

Hi gurran...

Would it be possible to get a screenshot (of a readout) from the command I've listed above?

Code:

lspci -nnk | grep -i net -A2

Please also include...

Code:

lshw -C network

Code:

ifconfig -a

Thanks!

michaelk · 03-11-2016, 04:27 PM

Didn't work but what was the error message etc?

gurran · 03-11-2016, 06:32 PM

@ardvark I can give you everything lshw, as it's not installed. https://imgur.com/a/C1MLH

@michael It didn't give an error, it loaded the driver just fine, but it did not do any good foractivating the hardware.

P.S.: I'm using Imgur because I have it on my phone where I'm making the posts and taking the pictures from. - simplicity.

michaelk · 03-11-2016, 06:35 PM

Try the command:
ifconfig -a