On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 05:22:07PM -0400, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:
Thanks for getting back to my question smiles. I believe i have been focused on Motherboards more than the ports for your exact reason, the ports are connection dependent. what about boards themselves?
Unfortunately software can only really test that the registers in the chips are responding as expected. The port on the board may still be damaged and not working even if you can talk to the chip that drives the port. There is often another chip involved between the controller and the port to convert voltage levels (a PHY in the case of a network port or a level converter for a serial port). If that chip is damaged (and if a port has a surge that is the chip most likely to take the damage) then you won't find out other than by trying to use it unfortunately. -- Len Sorensen