It's a flavour of Hauppage card that I have, and it gets detected mostly correctly (as some flavour of Connexant I think). However on occasion, it doesn't get detected at all or at least when I use w-scan I seem to recall it reports "no usable DVB card available". I'll have to double check that the next time it happens.

However on a reboot it's normally fine (sometimes more than one reboot required - though I only recall that happening once). It doesn't make a lot of sense that the card is faulty (or the motherboard for that matter) as when it is correctly detected/initialised it will work without error for long periods of time.

I did google for similar problems, but onyl really came across cards not being detected consistently.

I am running Slackware 14.2, though I doubt it's much to do with the distribution.

Since you did not provide the Hauppauge model etc look at this post.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...re-4175596542/

The card works, on occasion though it isn't detected at boot (or correctly intialised at boot, not sure which). That is the problem. I don't need drivers for it, as it is they're part of the default installation and installation of those wasn't required.

It is possible the card is not being reset correctly which could be due to a faulty motherboard or card. This could keep the card from being enumerated correctly which means it isn't recognized.

Has this always happened or something that occurred over time?

You could at least tell us the device model. Anyway FWIW, here's a thread where some users experienced intermittent problems similar to what you've described

https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.as...&topicid=25041

The post by dingbatt (19-Mar-2011 12:16) may be of interest where it was found that the host PC BIOS was the cause of the issue, and disappeared once an update was applied.

After michaelk's hint...

You might try removing the card and reinstalling it on your motherboard, perhaps moving it to another slot. Then use the command dmesg and the program lshw or something similar to see if it is found as a device.

This should answer the first question in fault finding. Is it plugged in?

I didn't mention the card as I can't logically see that it's a problem with the card, though I could be wrong I guess.

But in any case it's an old one, a Win-TV HVR 1300. Uses the cx88 driver I think.

When it works, it works perfectly, but it just isn't always detected (well, I think that's the case). Also, when not detected, quite often it will detect on a vanilla warm reboot. I can't see that being symptomatic of a BIOS issue, but I'll update that in the next day or two and see what happens.

I have swapped the card between PCI slots and the behaviour is the same. It doesn't fail that often as it goes, but it is irritating when it does. I'll have to check various outputs the next time it happens and report back as I haven't investigated much beyond trying and failing with w_scan.

Always as far as I've noticed. I've had the card a while, but only really started using it recently.

Well, it's not likely to be an operating system specific problem IMHO, and the link that I shared is one of several I found that seem to indicate some of these devices don't always initialize correctly when the PCI bus is reset at boot. It could be a timing issue specific to particular motherboards, so definitely worth updating the BIOS. If that doesn't work, I doubt there's anything further that can be done except to try a different host machine.

It probably has to do with the way the firmware is loading and unloading. Since it's a PCI card, I don't recommend hotplugging to check the dmesg output. It's a kernel-based defect that you just have to report.

When it fails, run to see if the card is recognized by the PCI bus.

If the firmware is messing up you might find that there is no /dev/video0 device.

I would have thought a firmware issue would behave more consistently. Unloading and reloading the driver should take care of that situation, and can also be captured with dmesg. Something more fundamentally wrong IMO.

For what it's worth I had issues with a BlackMagic Intensity PCI-e x1 card not being reliably detected.
The bios it would sometimes show a card at x0 speed in the slot. So the PC knew something was in the slot, but it didn't how up in an lspci or anything.
If the bios showed x1 for the speed then it was working. That machine was dual boot at the time and it wasn't visible in Linux or Windows, so it wasn't an OS specific issue.

I eventually ended up swapping power supplies and I never had troubles with it being detected after that.
Both power supplies were equally powerful, the "non-wokring" one was modular and the one that "worked" wasn't.

Interesting regarding the PSU. This is an old Dell machine I think, and generally they're a little under specced if memory serves. Will have to take a look at that too if the BIOS update doesn't resolve the issue.

With my card I went thought the BIOS updates and tried changing various settings that the mobo tech support asked me to.
Not sure what prompted me to try another power supply. It's not like the PSU had issues powering up the computer or anything. The fact that it randomly worked didn't lead me to believe it was a power problem.

If you can try the card in another machine that might be something else to help narrow it down.