PCI slot lost on power up?

[Ivor Bowden <ivor@peritek.com>]

Hi PCI experts,

I wonder if any one else has seen this problem and knows of a workaound:

We are making a test station for PCI boards.
We are using a Catalyst PCIBX64 "intelligent" extender board.
It is a passive board with bus and power switching, that can
be accessed via a parallel port.

The problem is, if there is no board in the slot, or if the extender
is turned off, AT POWER UP, then the slot is essentially dead.

It is not a BIOS problem, I load the BARS after boot up. It does not
make any difference which board is in the slot, as long as it is a
valid PCI board. I can even do a "hard" reset and reboot without a
board in the slot and it works, it is only on initial power up that
the board must be there. It is like there is a hardware circuit that
determines if the board is there at power up and defeats the slot if
it is not. I did scope the PCI clock line, it is there in both cases.

The motherboard is a VA-503+ with the VIA APOLLO MVP3 chipset and a
Pentium MMX 233MHz processor.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
-Ivor

Ivor Bowden
Peritek Corp
5550 Redwood Road
Oakland, CA 94619 USA
phone: (510) 531-6500
FAX: (510) 530-8563
url: www.peritek.com
email: ivor@peritek.com