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Re: rediscovering hardware



Tony Godshall wrote:
According to Kent West,

Tom Allison wrote:


Hello,

I replaced my motherboard after an accident.

Everything mostly works, but a lot of the on board hardware (sound in
particular) isn't the same as the old board.

I know the installation process (sarge installer) does a great job
finding out what I have and setting it up.

How can I "re-discover" the hardware on this machine and remove/add
modules accordingly?



You can remove modules with the "rmmod" command, or by using "modconf".
Or you can simply comment/remove the lines in "/etc/modules" and reboot.

With recent kernels and Debian versions (Sid, Testing), most of the
hardware should detect automagically. For those items that don't
autodetect, you can use "lspci" to find the chipset of the offending
device, then use "modconf" to try loading relevant modules.


The automagical bit is discover...

: Package: discover (2.0.7-2)
: hardware identification system
: : Discover is a hardware identification system based on the
: libdiscover2 library. Discover provides a flexible interface
: that programs can use to report a wide range of information
: about the hardware that is installed on a Linux system. In
: addition to reporting information, Discover includes support
: for doing hardware detection at boot time.
: : Discover was contributed by Progeny. : co-Maintainers : Jeff Licquia [mail]
: Ian Murdock [mail]

Thanks, Jeff, Ian.

Tony



The problems I have is this:

I have modules listed in the modules file that no longer exist in the system.
I have hardware devices that do not exist in the modules file.
I need to resolve this conflict and a large part of it is the sound drivers.

lspci returns

0000:00:0b.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 008e (rev a3) (prog-if 85 [Master SecO PriO])
        Subsystem: ABIT Computer Corp.: Unknown device 1c08

I can't seem to find much more about it other than it might be an intel chipset. But with a total of 62 modules being currently loaded I am hoping to avoid spending potentially days unloading/reloading/rebooting my workstation. Considering that right not I cannot afford any downtime (end of term for wife and kids) this is a really poor option.

Right now I'm thinking my best approach would be to just use Knoppix or some other installation to see what the devices might be and try and diff the files.

But I'm thinking that there is a better way since Debian could or should detect this hardware as a part of the installation under sarge-installer. It seems to be a lot easier if there was some way to utilize the work invested in S-I to reidentify the hardware in the system and use that to build the modules configuration file. This would hopefully remove both the old legacy modules and impliment the new modules.

While systems may do some kind of auto-detect of the hardware when they start, I find it difficult to believe that they would actually go through and rebuild the modules conf files at every boot (auto config rather then auto-detect).



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