PCI card not recognised in one machine but fine in another

cs-cam · 05-27-2006, 03:56 AM

I recently built a cheap computer to use as a MythTV box and after doing some research I decided that the TV card I already had wasn't up to the task and today I bought a Hauppauge PVR-500 MCE which is a dual-tuner card and should fit me nicely. Installation went fine but after I booted up there was no sign of the card in dmesg output or lspci. Like it doesn't exist. I tried the obvious stuff like try another PCI slot and I put the old card back in to make sure I hadn't accidently broken anything and it still works so I'm assuming I can rule the motherboard out as the problem. I tried the new card in a Windows 2000 machine I have here and it's detected fine so therefore the card isn't at fault either.

My best guess which I'm looking for either confirmation of or a NO WAI!!! is the power supply. Is it possible the power supply isn't putting out enough juice so it's just pretending the card isn't there? The single-tuner card works but the dual-tuner doesn't, I was going for something a little less power hungry than your average desktop and this machine has a 300W PSU which is running an Intel BLKD101GGCL motherboard, a Pentium D 2.66GHz, one 300GB SATA disk and a Geforce 6200.

I'm no hardware expert, does the power supply sound like it could be the problem? I don't know a lot about the PSU, it came with this case. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

EDIT: Okay, to further complicate the issue I just booted the Windows machine from a live CD (albeit not too recent - 2.6.11) and the TV card wasn't listed in lspci. I wouldn't have thought that would have anything to do with the kernel though, lspci accesses the PCI bus directly doesn't it? Well I can assume that rules out the PSU as the problem

sonnik · 05-27-2006, 05:31 AM

Check the "plug and play" sections of BIOS (if there is one) in the computer where it's working. Windows may be able to manage the IRQs, whereas Linux isn't.

If this isn't the case please give the following info...

Computer #1 (Working)
Os(es) (Windows, FreeBSD)
Motherboard, Chipset, Hardware

Computer #2 (Not Working)
Os(es)
Motherboard, Chipset, Hardware...

cs-cam · 05-27-2006, 06:28 AM

Thanks for the reply, something to do with IRQs sounds like the culprit. After some more Googling I found this command (and resulting output):

Code:

[ marvin :: /root ]-> dmesg | grep -i irq | grep -i disabl
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 10 11) *0, disabled.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 10 11) *0, disabled.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 10 11) *0, disabled.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 10 11) *0, disabled.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKE] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 10 11) *0, disabled.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 10 *11), disabled.

FYI I don't have a clue what I'm doing in the BIOS of a computer other than turning off those annoying splash screens and playing with the device boot order. Sad but true. It's an Award BIOS, under Advanced the Plug 'n' Play O/S option was set to No, I changed that to Yes and rebooted but no luck, I wasn't expecting it to work but it was worth a shot.

I did some more investigating and under Peripheral Configuration there didn't look like anything helpful however it has an IRQ assigned to the serial port and parallel port. I am 100% sure I will never use either of those, would setting them both to disabled free up some resources or am I on the wrong track? I didn't try them on disabled because as I said, I don't know what I'm doing and I don't want to break anything

Thanks for your help

EDIT: Okay, I was assured in IRC that disabling the serial and parallel ports wouldn't hurt anything so I tried that and still no love. dmesg shows the same as above once linux has booted.

cs-cam · 05-27-2006, 07:33 PM

Some more information. During boot on the screen just after POST where it lists a PCI device table, there is a Display controller (my graphics card?) and a Multimedia controller listed. Would the Multimedia one be the TV card? It's listed at IRQ 7. I've also done some more digging, I tried a bunch of options from here with no luck. I did find something consistant across the board though, this message in dmesg:

Quote:

PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 3 of device 0000:00:00.0

Right before that I get a message that suggests if a device doesn't work, try pci=routeirq which I did try but it made no difference. Another thing, when I try pci=noacpi boot freezes at detecting hardware. I checked the initscripts and what it's doing there is probing some modules based on /sys/devices/pci*.

Here is my complete dmesg output. Hopefully it'll mean something to someone.

sonnik · 05-27-2006, 11:19 PM

Just a longshot, try:

acpi=noirq

I wouldn't mess with IRQs more than you have to, if you haven't had resolution yet. I just don't want you to further complicate the issue.

cs-cam · 05-27-2006, 11:26 PM

I tried that today without any luck. I need this working ASAP so I can justify spending the money (

) so I borrowed a copy of Windows MCE off a friend so get it up and running. After a lot of playing around on IRC with one of the Frugalware devs he suggested I grab some details and email the LKML to see if it's a known bug or what. Once I get it all settled I'll probably install linux on another partition and see if I can get those details or maybe it'll be fixed in a newer kernel by then.

Thank you for your help though, it's been very much appreciated