How to hot swap hardware that do not support hot swap?

You cab try removing the device and then triggering a bus rescan. This article covers the how. But it working can depend heavily on the device itself.

You can also damage the device while removing/installing it. the PCIe connector is not meant for hot swap so you can have arc issues or shorting if you are not very careful to remove it very precisely.

The voltage is not that high so it is probably ok but there is a chance. I would just reboot it. If it happens often enough to be a problem, fix the problem that causes the power loss. Check for physical issues etc., you might be facing an eventual fire if it is a physical problem like the card is drooping out of the slot or is not properly seated or the slot is damaged.

If you need to physically remove the card you probably should look into something like this:

Paladin said:

You can also damage the device while removing/installing it. the PCIe connector is not meant for hot swap so you can have arc issues or shorting if you are not very careful to remove it very precisely.

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AFAIK this isn't completely true. The PCIe connector is hot swap capable, using a similar system to SATA: longer ground pins and a slightly recessed enable pin.

This stackexchange post covers most of it.

But practically it's correct in that most devices aren't designed to support hot swapping, and outside of a server chassis with PCIe card carriers that use a latch/lever type mechanism to ensure cards are inserted evenly, I wouldn't want to rely on hand plugging in something like a 16x card and getting the contact insertion 100% correct.

Yeah I think I would still recommend first looking for a solution to the actual problem. It could be as simple as moving it to a different slot, or checking to see if it needs a support to stay inserted fully. Or it could be a problem with the board not supplying enough power consistently (motherboard or power supply issues, or lack of a secondary power input for the card, etc.). Eventually, a software solution to reload the card will just result in the card finally dying from repeated power cycling.

I may be wrong but my reading of this was that it's not an issue with the PCIe slot or motherboard. The I/O board is installed in the PCIe slot, and there is some external hardware connected to it which has its own power supply. If that external hardware loses power (for whatever reason it's something that regularly happens) then the I/O card, and thus the OS, no longer recognizes the external hardware until the I/O card itself is also reset, which requires a reboot of the computer. OP is looking for a way to re-initialize the I/O board via software.

If the I/O board itself is no longer recognized by the system, but it's being caused by the external hardware resetting, then that's a pretty shitty I/O board design, but it wouldn't indicate there is a fault with the mainboard or the card's power circuitry. If the I/O board is still recognized by the OS, and it's just the external hardware that stops working, then it seems like there ought to be a software command that could be sent to the I/O board itself to tell it to reinitialize without requiring the whole system to be rebooted or the card hot-plugged or reinitializing the PCIe subsystem.

Oh maybe so. I thought the 'i/o board' was the PCIe device and it was the thing having issues.

software can't fix shitty hardware.

Why is power interrupted?

m0nckywrench said:

Why is power interrupted?

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Don't you go using logic and suggesting fixing the underlying problem.