Re: Adaptec 2940U irq problem

On Thu, 25 May 2006 08:41:59 GMT, Bruce Patis
<brucep1000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 21 May 2006 04:09:38 GMT, "Politically Incorrect"
<PI@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi all

I've got a Compaq Evo500 P4. I originally setup the IDE disk with a triple boot - Win98, W2K and Winxp. That worked OK but recently I bought a Seagate Cheetah 15K 36gb disk and want to re-create the triple boot on this disk. I can get W2k and Winxp installed and working fine with several different scsi cards but whenever I try to install Win98 from these cards it installs OK but when I check device manager it shows a exclamation mark for the scsi card and system resources are set to IRQ 0 and some memory conflicts with motherboard resources. I have tried just about everything I could fiddling with the system bios but nothing I've done changes anything with regard to system resource conflicts. I've tried assigning an irq in the system bios for the scsi card but it doesn't seem to have any effect. I've tried this with both bus mastering disabled as well as enabled and the other bus option I've fiddled with is PCI Serr# Generation, setting it both as enabled and disabled, without any
effect on the system resource conflict. Is there anything I can do to get a scsi card assigned an IRQ other than the current setting of 0?

Tomo

The Adaptec 2940U is a PCI card. The choice of resources used by each
card on a PCI bus is usually determined automatically by the computer,
so a PCI card like an Adaptec 2940U has no means for a user to do that
manually. However, the BIOS Setup in most PCI bus computers has
options where you can control that to some extent, e.g. disable the
automatic function for specific IRQs, etc. In addition, recent
versions of MS-Windows communicate with the computer's PCI system, so,
if you prefer, you can also make some of those choices by using a
Windows applet like Device Manager. However, the BIOS Setup method is
more reliable, especially when using more than one OS.

If you need additional details about how to manage PCI cards, there is
a considerable amount of info available on various Web sites, as well
as in other newsgroups that deal more generally with computer
motherboards and local buses. BTW, since you have a Compaq computer,
which often does things differently than a more generic brand, it
might be good to first get info about that topic from other Compaq
users.

Bruce


After rereading your original post, I realized that I didn't reply to
your statement that you only have a resource conflict when running
Windows 98. Since more than one card on a PCI bus can use the same
IRQ, there might be no actual resource conflict in hardware, but
Windows 98 thinks that there is. Worse, it might be trying to "fix" a
non-existent conflict, even undoing what you manually did in the
computer's BIOS Setup.

This is not the proper forum for an in-depth discussion of MS-Windows,
especially which version is better (or worse) in some respects, but
there are many such forums available, including Windows newsgroups.
So I'll just briefly mention a few ideas related to software.
1. Check with the Windows experts to find out if the same scenario has
occurred with other PCI cards in Windows 98 and what they did to
resolve it.
2. The software driver for the Adaptec 2940U could be the culprit. So
also check the Adaptec and Microsoft knowledge bases for things like
reports of a bug in the driver you are using for Windows 98. An
experiment that you could try is to install the Adaptec-supplied
driver for Windows 98, then the Microsoft-supplied driver, or
vice-versa, one at a time, and see if either makes a difference.
3. You also mentioned that Windows 98 reported a possible memory
conflict. Like other plug-in cards with an onboard BIOS, the BIOS in
the 2940U firmware uses a region in upper memory (A000h-FFFFh) that
can conflict with other things using that same memory address. That
BIOS is only necessary when booting the computer from a SCSI HD. So,
if you do not need that feature, disable the SCSI BIOS via the
SCSISelect utility on the card (accessed by pressing Ctrl-A when the
computer boots, but before any OS is loaded). However, if the SCSI
BIOS was usiing a memory address that was also being used by something
else, it would typically have caused problems that were not
OS-specific.

Bruce


.

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