Re: PCI excessive retry error

["Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>]

On Mon, 10 May 2004, John Bradford wrote:

> > I mentioned a "broken bus" in the beginning. Some new
> > PCI boards are not 5-volt tolerant. If you plug them into
> > the PCI bus of some motherboards (Intel 865PE chipset),
> > The Intel D865PERL, for one, the PCI/Bus will get blown.
> > Same with the MS-6585 (648 MAX board). I blew up several
> > boards by plugging 3.5 volt PCI cards into the 5 volt
> > bus. According to the rules, it's supposed to work unless
> > the PCI slots have "Cadium Yellow" or "Brilliant Blue"
> > keying plugs (I kid you not, it's in the PCI specs).
>
> So, did you actually plug the cards in to the wrong coloured slots, or
> do you have a 3.5 volt-incompatible motherboard with a colour of slots
> which suggests compatibility?
>
> John.
>

I have two broken motherboards that have off-white color slots
that imply that they should certainly not blow up if anything
that fits is plugged into them!

So I plugged in two high-speed data-link boards and nothing worked.
Upon removal of the boards, my SCSI controller was no longer seen
on the PCI/Bus. I called the data-link board vendor (actually a
division of this company) and they said; "Idiot! They are 3.5 volt
boards!". I said; "Yeh? The PCI Spec says they should be compatible!"
They said; "There is no PCI spec for such compatibility......", etc.
etc. When I quoted the page on the book, they said; "That's only a
BOOK, not a specification...." It's just like the l-k list.

So, some new PCI/Bus boards are not 5-volt tolerant. Some new
board slots run at 3.5 volts so older PCI/Bus boards won't
work (some do, some don't). It's a mess.

I also asked our wizards in the other division what kind of
platform the boards were supposed to be working in. They said
it was secret, but not a PC.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.26 on an i686 machine (5557.45 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.