Question Motherboard doesn't POST with pci card (not pci-e) plugged in, but posts and works fine if I plug the card a few seconds after powering on.

[kaseftamjid]

I recently got the urge to visit the second-hand computer market and got some ancient computer parts. An Asrock H61m-DPS motherboard, an intel i3-2120, and a D-link DGE-530T rev-B2 PCI gigabit ethernet card. My initial idea is to move my file server, which runs on an old dell laptop now, to this computer.

After I finished building this PC, I noticed something odd. If the network card is plugged in, the computer doesn't start at all. like nothing. The fans of the power supply and the CPU cooler very briefly turn on, do a sort of jerking motion and that's it. No post, no display, no beep code, no nothing. If I hold the power button, the fans sort of keep spinning like I'm trying to run them at a very low voltage. So I reasonably assumed its either the power supply of my computer or the network card that was broken.

But here comes the peculiar part. I plugged in the card while the PC was booted, partially out of laziness, and it was detected just fine. I ran lspci and it was there, the drivers auto-installed, I ran speedtest on the card, and it worked perfectly, gigabit ethernet right there. What's going on? I restarted the PC, and it couldn't turn back on, same issue as before. But if I take the card out, and then plug it in about a second after i press the power button, it works perfectly fine.

Several things that I tested

1. Tried a different beefier power supply, same issue.
2. Put the card on a different motherboard, worked fine.
3. Tested the PCI port with another random card, worked fine.
4. Tried removing all other connections except the essential ones and the network card, same issue.
5. Disabled serial and parallel port in the bios, suspecting an IRQ conflict, same issue.
6. Cleaned the PCI ports, same issue.
7. Reset the bios multiple times, with the battery disconnected and connected, same issue.
8. Tried looking for IRQ manual assignment in bios, wasn't there.
9. Bios is the most recent version available... from 2013.

My guess here is there's "something" wrong with the configuration of "something" because I assume if the PCI slot or the card was broken, it wouldn't work at all. But it does the opposite, as if it just can't get through post.

One thing to note here, the motherboard already has a gigabit ethernet port, so it's not much of an issue if I can't get this PCI card to work. My main goal here is to learn what's actually causing this problem and then maybe fix this. So there is no real reason here for me to get a new card or a newer system.

The current system installed on the PC is OpenMediaVault 6, which is based on Debian 11 bullseye. So i can post information if its command is available in linux.

 

[Lutfij]

I recently got the urge to visit the second-hand computer market and got some ancient computer parts. An Asrock H61m-DPS motherboard, an intel i3-3220, and a D-link DGE-530T rev-B2 PCI gigabit ethernet card.
Bad idea, if I were you I'd have looked into something about 2-3 years old, as opposed to something a decade old. Often times parts of that era can and will be duds, meaning you're buying into parts that were used by someone else, damaged by said individual and then sold off for scrap or nothing at all.

I plugged in the card while the PC was booted, partially out of laziness, and it was detected just fine.
You want to ruin your investment in an instant, don't you?

You might want to mention the specs to your hodge-podge build, like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:

 

[SkyNetRising]

I plugged in the card while the PC was booted, partially out of laziness

You can damage motherboard and pci card by doing so.

 

[kaseftamjid]

Well, no defense on my part as there's no doubt that inserting the card into a running system was a very bad idea, but I kind of got tunnel vision while looking for a solution.
My system specs

CPU: I3-2120 3.3 GHz, multiplier set to 20 for power saving reasons.
Motherboard: Asrock H61m-DPS
Ram: Adata 4 GB ddr3-1600mhz
SSD/HDD: 2x500 Gb, 1x320 Gb, all 7200 RPM
GPU: GT 1030
PSU: Currently on a generic 300-watt supply, tested with Masterwatt 550 power supply
Chassis: Generic
OS: OpenMediaVault 6, Debian 11 Bullseye

What could be the issue here? The times I tested, I don't have to wait longer than a second after pressing the power button to push the card in the PCI slot. I also checked /proc/interrupts and the network cards ( both the internal and the PCI one) were not sharing interrupt pins with anything else.