DMA card not detected: what to check, in order

The checks below are ordered by how often they are the answer and by how long they take. Do not start with the firmware.

A charge-only USB-C cable carries power and no data. It lights the board up and the second PC sees nothing. This is the single most common cause on a card that has never worked.

Use the cable that came with the board, or a cable you know carries data, and try another port on the second PC while you are at it.

Power the game PC down and check the card is fully seated, with the retaining clip closed. A card that is in far enough to get power but not far enough to enumerate behaves exactly like a dead one.

If the board has activity lights, look at them with the machine on: a board that never lights up has a power or a slot problem, not a software one.

Most boards appear as an FTDI device. Open Device Manager on the second PC and look for it.

• Nothing at all: cable or port (go back to 1).
• An unknown device, or one with a warning triangle: install the FTDI D2XX drivers.
• A plain serial port where the FPGA device should be: Windows took it with its own driver. Uninstall that driver for the device and let the FTDI package take it.

The device is exclusive. Another tool, another loader, a second copy of the same one, or a console window left open from an earlier attempt will keep the handle and every later attempt fails with the device busy or not found.

Close everything that talks to the card, including anything minimised to the tray, and try again.

If the device opens but reads make no sense, or stopped making sense after a hardware change, the memory map no longer matches the machine. Delete elusive_mmap.txt and let the next run write a new one.

This is not the cause when the device does not open at all.

Last, and only when everything above is ruled out. A board that was flashed with a firmware that does not match it may enumerate oddly or not at all. That is a conversation with the seller of the card, not a step to improvise: a bad flash can leave a board that no longer appears on any bus.

Our products do not require any particular firmware.

Collect what the loader printed - it names the step that failed - and open a ticket from your account, or ask on Discord. "It does not work" takes a day; the log line takes a minute.