Demistifying PCI Devices
Finding the manufacturer of a device may be painful and routine work. The variety of peripherals and the fact that but few OS do support drivers for all the devices in regular way, makes it a hard work to identify a device and find its exact characteristics - this is the knowledge required to make it function as expected. In Bored Sysadmin's Blog we can find an example of the mentioned technique: How to identify ANY mysterious “PCI Device”
The story goes: I get a lot of request to assist people with different PCs – from self built white boxes, laptops and netbooks to help them to identify and install right drivers for the “PCI Device”.
To really help yourself guys and girls, just do couple of simple steps before asking for help. Open your device manager and look for details tab on than “PCI Device” (Check out for Sample here) Write down Hardware ID Tab info (or copy/paste it) into site below:
In example above note the first line:
PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3059&SUBSYS_140117F2
In this specific example there is a hint, Windows was able to guess it’s Multimedia-audio controller, but lets do more scientific approach.
VEN stands for vendor and numbers after underscore are 1106. Quick search in database reveals its VIA Technology, but device search is even more detailed – 3059 – Notice the third line from top (Vendor ID 0x1106 – Via Technology). Also take a note of 3 last entries mentioning AC’97 Audio controller, since it’s probably what we looking for anyhow, but lets not jump the horse yet.
Click on the vendor name links and just scroll down till you find your device id (or just search for it. And there you go, device ID 0x3059 refers to VIA South Bridge VT8235.
There are several sites dedicate to devices' ids; one should start their quest for drivers and software from manufacturer's sites, in case this is possible - however, every system administrator can suggest a repository or two, where the correct pieces of software can be found. This is especially important when an open-source OS is used, such as Linux - for which one can't find device drivers easily.
This article was brought to you by the developers of IPHost Network Monitor, network and server monitoring software.