6.12 Non-PnP Cards
In contrast to PnP cards, non-PnP cards always have their resources set in the hardware. That is they always have an address and IRQ unless there is a jumper setting, etc. for disabling the device. Sometimes the resources used can be found by probing done by the device driver or by other software that does probing. For example "scanport" (Debian only ??) probes most IO port address and may find ISA devices. But be warned that it might hang your PC. Sometimes it will fail to find hardware that's actually there (since the hardware has the default 0xff in it's registers). Even if It finds the hardware it will not show the IRQ nor will it positively identify the hardware.
So one way to try to find such hardware is to start a driver, which may probe for such hardware. By looking at the boot-time messages, you might see a driver start and find the hardware. Otherwise, you may need to find a driver and start it (for example, by having it load as a module).
Finding the right driver may be difficult. Sometimes there just isn't any driver since some devices aren't (yet ?) supported by Linux. To determine which driver you need, look at any documentation which might identify the card. If this fails, look on the card itself, including important names/numbers on the chips. But the identification of the driver module you need may not be anywhere on the card. You could find the FCC id on the card and then search the Internet with the FCC id number to try to find more information about the card (or the chips on it).
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