PCI card not recognized

[devils_advisor]

Hi, im out of ideas. i have a pci card thats not beeing recognized in any mac i install it. profiler doesnt show anything. its like the card is not in there. i only saw that once with a sonnett card that did the same thing unless i put it in a pc and it worked there. what could be the problem, any ideas or solutions ?

thanks for the help

[MusicWorks]

Hi!

It is indeed strange, here are a few ideas:

- If its a Windoze card it will never show up in the Mac environment (duh!)

- There were several PCI revisions, with different bus widths and voltages! (great for backwards compatibility, huh!). It might be an incompatible revision or even a newer PCIe, which is unlikely unless you are blind:

"The first version of conventional PCI found in consumer desktop computers was a 32-bit bus using a 33 MHz bus clock and 5 V signalling, although the PCI 1.0 standard provided for a 64-bit variant as well. These have one locating notch in the card. Version 2.0 of the PCI standard introduced 3.3 V slots, physically distinguished by a flipped physical connector to preventing accidental insertion of 5 V cards. Universal cards, which can operate on either voltage, have two notches"

- The last, but not least, is the card itself. If the card has a fuse, it might have blown (Digidesign Disk IO cards come to mind). If not, probably some components needs replacing (electrolytic caps...)

Hope this helps!

Regards,

- MusicWorks

[MusicWorks]

It could also be a drivers issue...some cards will need the proper extension in the Extensions folder to show up.

Here is a key to the PCI card revisions:

[devils_advisor]

The machines are a beige g3 and several g4's,  none of them seems to recognize the card. Even if there is something wrong with it shouldn't it show something? The card is a orangepc 660. The app wont start without the card beeing physically seen or available. I put the card in blank without any ram or cpu attached and still the same. Tested every single slot even just by itself.

[MusicWorks]

Could you photograph the card? Are there any capacitors? This way we can determine if there any signs of leakage and discard other problems.

In terms of system requirements:

Hardware/Software Requirements

Any Power Macintosh with at least one available 12" PCI slot
16 MB of Macintosh RAM (OrangePC application uses less than 1024KB)
300 MB free hard disk Space
System 8.1 or newer, Open Transport 1.3 or newer
Extended keyboard is preferred
Any MultiScan or MultiSync Display
The Blue G3 must have Power Macintosh G3 Firmware Update version 1.0.2 installed

[devils_advisor]

Took 3 but i had to use the tablet

[MusicWorks]

Much better!

Overall the card looks in good shape, there is no corrosion or damage to the PCB and it looks minty. I can see there are quite a lot of surface mounted ICs, processors, slots and not many caps (which is a good thing)

From what I can gather there are no obvious signs of leakage, but with SMC (surface mount capacitors) you are rarely going to see actual leakage if the cap has gone bad -given they are sealed inside a tiny metal enclosure. They do tend to dry up and are usual suspects in motherboard reparing of classic Macs.

If you want to check them out they are located towards the left side of the PCB if seen from top view and they have half-black and half-metal color (they are actually 470uf). I would bet they have dried up and  need replacing -can you use a solder iron?

You can find high quality replacements in places like RS-Components or Mouser. If you are in Germany it's an easy find probably

If any of you are repairing a classic mac logic board, these are the little caps to look out for. They don't have legs and are soldered/unsoldered directly on the PCB with a special iron that is like tweezers (alternatively with the use of two regular solder irons and much care).


- MusicWorks

[devils_advisor]

I let you do it as long as the card runs im happy.