Re: MCP2 on Intel 945 Mobo advice?

Mike Luther wrote:
I really appreciate the time you took to respond David .. Can you hang in here with me for some thoughts about what you posted?


David T. Johnson wrote:

Mike Luther wrote:

I saw the same string of DOSCALL1 traps when trying to use an SMP kernel and an Nforce4 chipset with an Athlon X2 dual processor system. Try using the Uni kernel or the W4 kernel, if you are not doing so.



I am using the simplest level or W4 kernel. Checking with the Intel site I'm almost sure that this CPU is the Intel 341 Celeron unit, but is not a dual core processor. I also note that in the case of the 915GAV boards I proofed these are completely working except for the audio which is still on SBlive 5.1 service with Uniaudio support. As well, the 915GAV boards are on the Pentium 4 CPU from Intel. Not the Celeron as was given to me here for test.


I notice that the BIOS setup screens are quite different between the 915GAV and 945GTP boards. And so are the complete Intel ID's for the controllers as well as for the NIC chip for which the PRO100 Intel driver works on the 915GAV very well, but can't even finish a correct load on whatever is in this 945GTP board.

Another thing, try turning the onboard USB controllers off and remming out the config.sys entries for the usb drivers. I also saw something like what you're getting with the onboard USB controllers with the Nforce4.



Yes, I see where you are advising me to research. I did try disabling the USB controllers with the BIOS setup. You have only two choices in this 945GTP BIOS setup. You can Enable or Disable USB. You can also Disable USB Legacy mode if you wish. Disabling this makes no difference here.


Switching to an ASUS A8V with the Via chipset instead of the Nforce4 fixed all of the problems and also let me use the Athlon X2.



But there is, I think, even more to all this which you or others might see here which could help.

I now actually have LAN service working from the 945GTP by plugging in a Kingston KT120 PCI NIC into one of the available PCI slots. With the correct driver for it loaded, it goes through a complete DHCP enabled boot run. It produces an almost standard log output for DHCPCD.LOG as enabled for test here. When the desktop comes up it is totally capable of connecting to the IP service via the ZyXel cable router here on the 945GTP. But two strange things are still 'broken' about this.


First, although the whole DHCPSTRT operation or DHCPCD variance of that does complete during CONFIG.SYS and obtains lease, once that is done, curiously, it is then impossible to start up DHCPMON or run the monitor to get any of the information! The monitor game totally fails! But lease renewal and all goes on silently in the background just fine.. Interesting. I can go in with SYSINFO and see the assigned private address and all that! But nothing I can do with the DHCP monitor game will ever load or work. Wierd. I can even start DHCPSTRT after the Desktop is up. Connects fine; no monitor or anything from that point on doing it that way either.

I'll assume that your basic networking setup is okay and was working on the sytem you migrated from so I think this is a hardware problem with IRQ sharing between your NIC and the rest of the system. Also, what you say below suggests that.



Thoughts?


But before you spend time on that here is another curious issue. Although the DHCP operation completes, in the DHCPLOG the 'Domain' is a strange 'dhcpcd8d' value I have never seen before in any logging operation I've examined. I can do a HOST command and see the proper host on it. I can use TCP/IP setup and whatever. Nothing I can do can change this reported parameter I see for the connection log.


And one more issue seems sort of clear to me. IRQ conflicts. If I enable the PCI Express configuration in the Intel BIOS, I get rid of the conflict for the IRQ table corruption report line using the PCI utility. That is, unless two PCI cards are plugged into the two available PCI slots on the 945GTP motherboard. Here is, I think more of the reason for errors.


For initial tests I did not enable the on-board audio. Knowing that the Intel 915GAV didn't work at all with the Intel 850/60-880 audio chipset and Uniaudio, I used the SBlive 5.1 plug-in PCI slot audio cards for the 915GAV work. That thread on the Intel 850 audio work Vladest has done is HUGE, and some people report that the chipset is working with the 915 boards. Not here yet. But .. I tried the SBlive 5.1 audio card here adjacent to the Kingston KT-120 NIC card.

Pow. Nothing works again.

Sounds even more like an IRQ sharing problem. My experience is that this is usually a hardware thing, not software. The software will share the IRQs okay if the hardware will. The problem is that the add-on hardware cards, especially older ones, are very reluctant to share IRQs. I would try disabling all of the onboard hardware such as COM ports, NIC, audio, IEEE384, etc. and try a boot to see what works. For the add-on cards, you don't have a lot of flexibility since there are only two slots if I understand correctly, but you might try reversing the cards between those slots to see what happens.

The Uniaudio latest 1.0.9 off Hobbs installs fine. With a little fudging, so does the UnimixPM. The whole audio reports loaded fine during the CONFIG.SYS run. It traces in SYSINFO and also in the PCI utility sniff runs. But there is no sound.

FWIW, that 1.0.9 is really 1.0.13 based on the verbose report from booting. Anyway, what hardware is the driver reporting at boot. Look very carefully at the scroll display during boot to see what the driver is reporting that it is actually using because it might be trying to use your onboard audio even though you've switched it off. Some hardware doesn't turn 'off' even though you switch the bios setting to 'disabled.'


And IP service with this working but no report DHCP service goes merrily on as if nothing happened. Why? If I look at the PCI log run for what is happening on the PCI sniff, as well as with the PCI substitution IRQ utility analyzer, I see ..


Both those on board PCI slots are FORCED to share the same IRQ 11
which is shared by a whole lot of other stuff too!

That's unfortunate. A lot of motherboards will use different IRQs between different slots, especially those with four or more slots. If your two cards don't like to share an IRQ, your only solution would be to not use one. The sharing isn't necessarily a problem by itself. For example, on this system, I have four devices using IRQ 11: an add-on parallel port card, two USB controllers, and the add-on GeForce 6200 video card. IRQ 5 is shared by three devices, an add-on Hauppage PVR350 WinTV card, the onboard ALC850 sound, and an onboard USB controller, yet everything apparently works okay.



And if I yank the KT-120 NIC and remove all the NIC stuff with MPTN the SBlive 5.1 card still produces no sound. And it is still jammed to all the other IRQ 11 stuff. Which as far as I know is one sure good way to get audio fouled up on OS/2 from previous experience. In the 915GAV boards, I can assign a somewhat unique IRQ 10 to the SBlive card. But I can't do that here with the Intel BIOS at all now.

Maybe try a different audio card would be one suggestion. Probably, though, what you want to do is get the onboard sound working and that will help. Sometimes, also, there is a BIOS option for restricting a particular IRQ. You might try setting that and see if you can get a solitary IRQ assigned to the SBLive so that the other devices will go off and find a different IRQ.



So .. what is your thought that, without SERIOUS work from Vladest and crew on the Uniaudio driver set, so that it can really share interrupts with things, that we will ever see audio on this board? And is this possibly why the Intel PRO100 network driver is failing too?

I suspect so.


Is this all because OS/2 is so much better than everything else out there that it can thread orchestrate the CPU operations instead of process oriented priorities even in WIN XP yet?

It's definitely getting more and more difficult to use OS/2 on new hardware. I wrestled with the kinds of issues you're having with an ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe motherboard for several days before I just gave up and got the A8V Deluxe that Lorne Sunley had recommended. So far, the A8V has been great but it is no longer for sale unless you buy a reconditioned board. I bought a reconditioned board from Monarch Computer online that turned out to be fine except that it came with an old BIOS version that wouldn't boot with an X2 processor. I had to stick in an old Socket 939 cpu to boot it and flash the bios and then it was fine with the new X2. The hot boards right now for Intel and AMD are SLI boards for their video game performance.

Since I need a PCI slot for the Actiontec modem plus maybe audio if .. I wonder what the future really holds with this Intel 945GTP board?

It looks like a high-maintenance board if you want to run OS/2 on it.


Or .. is this a Celeron vs. Pentium 4 deal? Curious mind wants to know...


Thanks!




--
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and IBM Web Browser v2.0.5
.

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