Lonely NIC seeks free IRQ (for fun and possible longterm relationship, no time waster

iar_xeno

Can an IRQ conflict cause intermittent "Operating System not found" messages to appear at startup (along with flaky behaviour at logon)?

My Trust NIC seemed to have formed an unhealthy relationship with my Geforce 2, insisting in cohabiting on the same IRQ.
I have moved the card from beside the GeForce to the farthest extremities of my MB
but it has just struck up a long distance relationship with my WinModem (I don't know what it sees in it, tbh).
Its a Trust NIC card on IRQ 3 along with the WinModem. I have IRQs free (at least IRQ 6 afaicr) but the NIC refuses to use them, preferring the company of other cards.

Normally I'm fairly open minded about these things but the neighbours have started to complain (namely the HDD)
Everynight upon bootup it makes up it's petulent mind as to whether to continue the bootup process or grind to a halt in moral outrage.

It's almost virus like behaviour (not surprising considering the amount cards that NIC has cohabited with)
but the HDD disappears from the BIOS settings as well, a reboot usually fixes it though.

So, does anyone have any ideas how to split this clingy NIC from it's unfortunate victims,
or should I wait until we set up a new board dealing with HW relationship problems hosted by Dr. Ruth?


In all seriousness though this is a bit of a pain as it's like playing russian roulette everyday, it might be the HDD
or controller but it seems coincidental about the IRQ conflict. Also I have a peer 2 peer between two trust NICs, and if either
PC isn't powered on the other one locks up temporarily (for a 1/2 second every 2-3 seconds) so if I take out one NIC both have to go.
If I ring up Dell they'll tell me to take out the 3rd party NIC and (probably) the PC will work fine and thats it as far as they're concerned.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Xenophobic

lphchild

Same thing here...had to remove the sblive dos legacy support. seemed to work ok after that.

lph

WhiteWashMan

i have a trust network card and its the best one ive ever used. it installed easy first time and has never let me down.
what i suggest is that you remove the network card, then your gforce.
check the cabling on your hard drive.
if it comes up with operating system not found then the cause is usally that your harddrive isnt connected properly, or that someonthing on your IDE cables isnt being nice. try switching around the stuffon your secondry ide cable. try booting with only your hard drive and then your harddrive and cd rom, and then stuff after that one at a time. figure out which is the culprit and move it to master if its slave and slave if its master.
reboot and install the network card.
reboot amek sure that your peer to peer is working fine
last thing to reinstall is your network card.
after that, it sould work fine.
network cards usually like to reside on irq11 or 10. irq 3 was always reserved in the 'old' days for legacy stuff. serial mice, isa card/8 bit cards etc.
do all that see if it dont work.

Paladin

quiet me!

[This message has been edited by Paladin (edited 13-08-2000).]

_CreeD_

Okay, PCI cards have their IRQ allocated by the BIOS - and it does this based on the slot it's in. Some of these Slots will be shared with other slots or onboard devices (Eg. USB/AGP), there is NO way to break this relationship. Have alook in the MBD manual for which ones are shared and then move your card accordingly. Or just move it a slot at a time until it's not sharing with anything else.

When you get the O/S not found messages is the HDD detected at all?
It's odd for a PCI device to interfere unless it tried grabbing IRQ 15/14 (IDE devices by default).
If it doesn't clear after you solve the Net card problem, but does if you take the card out.... Try doing a hardware clear of the CMOS (Should be a jumper on the MBD). Oft forgotten, but does wonders for strange hardware problems.

Pretty Land

[This message has been edited by _CreeD_ (edited 13-08-2000).]