SOLVED Win 7 not detecting PCI cards/slots

[Bart Brummans]

Perhaps this will help others out there with the same problem.
I like many others, jumped the bandwagon and have installed Win7 on six machines here at home. Four were new builds, one laptop, one an "older" desktop.
I like the OS, the way it looks...performs...and features.

The "older desktop" gave me a run-around. The prior OS was XP which means a clean install to go to Win 7. Not a big deal as win 7 is loaded with drivers and should normally "pick up" everything that is installed.
On this system this included a Linksys wireless card in one of the PCI slots.

Once the new OS was installed, it did not find the card IE there was no icon in the device manager for it...nothing.

Looked at the bios boot screen and here it was listed for PCI slot 1, IRQ 11, yet nothing in the OS.
Figured perhaps card is just in-compatible with Win7 and purchased a compatible card. Same problem! Moved it to a different slot, no difference.

Determined that the Win7 OS was just not "seeing" the PCI slots nor the cards, but why?
After a lot of searching I found the following to solve it.
- Go into safe mode with command prompt.
- Make sure that you are in the Systems32 directory.
- At the prompt type in (minus quotations):
-"bcdedit /set CONFIGACCESSPOLICY DISALLOWMMCONFIG"
- Reboot and the PCI slots should now work.

Mind you that the motherboard was an older ASUS A8V-X with the latest Bios installed. I was surprised though that Win7 behaved this way with older hardware.

I've done more searching as to what "disallowmmconfig" is, but have not been very successfull. Perhaps others can chime in.

Hope this can help someone out there.

Bart

 

[Kiwi_Tim]

I have the exact same problem with Windows 8 Pro 32bit. ASUS A8V-X mboard with PCI slots not working.

-"bcdedit /set CONFIGACCESSPOLICY DISALLOWMMCONFIG" is not recognized as a command in W8.

Is there a way to activate the PCI slots in W8?

Thanks,
Tim
New Zealand

 

[TrainableMan]

Tim, did you open the command prompt with "run as an administrator" ?

And are you sure you were at the \windows\system32 prompt?

 

[Kiwi_Tim]

I found my mistake: typed bcedit instead of bcdedit.

The policy was applied, but made no difference to my PCI slots. Windows still can't see them.

Thing is they worked in W7, but not W8. Very annoying.

Best regards,

Tim

 

[TrainableMan]

You might try posting your issue over in the Win8forums. Not sure regulars would know but someone could come along with a solution.

 

[Kiwi_Tim]

bcdedit /set CONFIGACCESSPOLICY DISALLOWMMCONFIG

This actually worked! After reboot, my sound card showed up in the device manager and I was able to install drivers and get it working.

This time it worked! All good on Windows 8 32 bit