"Andrew W" said:
One night I decided to turn my PC off at the mains, but next morning when I
turned it back on, my built in NIC and PCI capture card were no longer being
recognised.
They now come up as unknown devices and reinstalling or updating the drivers
is futile.
Even if I try to force the drivers they won't accept them.
What can be done?
Is there a PCI reset utility?
There are several possibilities.
1) Some kind of software problem. Maybe, but not likely. Especially
as reinstalling isn't helping. I have a Knoppix boot CD in my
collection, and if you had something like that (Knopper.net),
you could watch to see if Linux could find drivers for the hardware.
But that is a 700MB download. I don't know if there are any
smaller distros you could use, for a similar test. Linux is
a bit closer to the hardware, and you may be able to find
utilities that allow dumping PCI config space info.
2) There is a problem with ICH5 Southbridge chips, where if
static electricity enters a USB port, the Southbridge
goes into latchup. Your problem is not consistent with the
symptoms of that problem, as either the board will no longer
POST, or you'll just lose the use of the USB ports. I suppose
it is possible the PCI bus has just actually died, but
what are the odds of that. (Have a look at the top of
the Southbridge anyway, to see if there are any suspicious
burn marks on the top.)
3) There could be corrupted info stored either in the BIOS
chip or in the CMOS RAM in the Southbridge. You could try
the clear CMOS procedure (with the computer unplugged), as
per the section in the manual that describes "CLRTC". Go into
the BIOS setup and reenter any custom settings (such as which
disk to boot from). If you still cannot see the PCI bus, the
next step is to reflash the BIOS. You can reflash with the same
version you are using currently, or find another version on
the Asus download page. The reason you are flashing the BIOS,
is there are some segments in the BIOS chip, that get updated
at POST (DMI/ESCD/microcode cache). Also, there are occasional
cases where the BIOS code itself goes bad (I call that "bit rot"),
and reflashing the BIOS can fix that also. Since the boot block
on the BIOS computes a checksum, most of the time "bit rot"
should be detected by the checksum test. But, depending on the
algorithm used, not all faults can be detected that way (i.e.
a cyclic redundancy check calculation (CRC) is better than
simply summing all the bytes).
HTH,
Paul
