On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 12:09 PM Dale <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
