BIOS or hardware problem?

[speedlever]

I recently got my first digicam. I also bought a combo USB2.0/firewire combo PCI card and a firewire CF reader. I installed this in a W2k/sp3 system with an Asus A7V (1003 BIOS)/1 Gig Athlon/512Mb ram PC. I suffered random reboots of the system but all the pieces worked... sorta. I seem to have either a problem with the digicam or with some of the images being corrupted.. haven't figured that out yet.

In an attempt to determine whether the camera or the PC was at fault, I tried to load software that would let me DL directly from the camera to the PC. I ran into a problem that blew up my W2k installation. I couldn't even boot to safe mode.

So I bought a new HD and Win XP. I loaded up Win XP/sp1 and all went well (except for losing communication with the CD during the latter stages of the install.. had to cold boot to complete the install). All went well with the combo card except that once I plugged in the firewire CF reader, I began seeing random reboots of XP. Here is a msg I see in the event viewer:

>>AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address (0xcfc), which lies in the 0xcf8 - 0xcff protected address range. This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance.<<

At this point, I'm thinking I have a problem with the old BIOS of my A7V. So I flashed the BIOS to 1011 (latest I found). Now the PC won't boot with the combo card installed giving me the following msg:

>>PCI card plugged in slot 2 share IRQ with Promise IDE controller. Make sure the card support IRQ sharing.<<

Slot 2 holds the combo card. Regardless of the IRQ setting I set in the BIOS, I still get the same message every time I boot. So I removed the combo card and the PC works just fine.

Is my mobo too old to work with firewire? Did I likely screw up something during the BIOS flash (I used aflash). Was I supposed to clear my CMOS? (I didn't see that addressed at all in my A7V docs).

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

 

[speedlever]

Bump and an update.

I bought another firewire PCi card to try. Same problem. So I begin swapping cards around on the PCI bus. I find that it makes NO difference what card I put in slot 2, I always get the same msg:

>>PCI card plugged in slot 2 share IRQ with Promise IDE controller. Make sure the card support IRQ sharing.<<

Moving the combo firewire/USB 2.0 card to another slot enables the card and firewire reader to appear to function normally.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

looks like you're having memory addressing conflicts to me, check device manager for conflicts, more spacifically don't just look for the tale tale yellow bang, go through the entire memory sub-section and look for a blue ! in a white circle. If you find any figure out what is using that part of memory and see if it can be re-allocated.

 

[speedlever]

If I found the right memory subsection, I found no errors.

I think I'll run memtest86 and see what happens.

 

[speedlever]

I haven't had a chance to run the memtest program yet. But just a quick point: I did not have this IRQ sharing problem until I flashed the BIOS from 1003 to 1011. Somehow, methinks that HAS to be related.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

If thats so have you tried flashing back to the old bios to see if it goes away if it does, then that's the culprit, but it still looks like either an IRQ problem or memory addressing problem. Does that bios support apic? if so check to make sure it's enabled, this will expand available irq's resources.

Moving the combo firewire/USB 2.0 card to another slot enables the card and firewire reader to appear to function normally.

Just saw that...You could also have a bad pci slot. If it works in a different slot but not in that one it would seem likely, try putting in another pci device(modem or something) in that slot and see if it gives you problems as well. Sorry I didn't notice that earlier.

 

[speedlever]

I haven't tried back flashing yet. I'm hoping to hear from Asus soon.

>Does that bios support apic? if so check to make sure it's enabled, this will expand available irq's resources<

Do you mean ACPI? How would I find out? I just rebooted and looked at my BIOS, but didn't see anything that looked like that.

I would tend to doubt the bad PCI slot since it has been working fine until the BIOS flash. At least, the 2nd NIC I had in there worked just fine. I've swapped cards around, and NO card works now in that slot. The computer won't boot past that error msg about IRQ sharing I mentioned earlier.

I'm not too crazy about doing a lot of mobo BIOS flashing. I do run off a UPS so I guess my exposure is not all that great.

 

[speedlever]

I'm getting pretty good at flashing my BIOS these days. ;-)

I've backflashed my BIOS from 1011 to 1010a and 1007 with the same results: it won't boot with a PCI card in slot 2. I get the same error message regardless of what card I put there.

I'm back to BIOS 1003 and can use slot 2 just fine. Go figure. Maybe I should just leave well enough alone!

On another note, has anyone had a problem with XP taking 90+ seconds to logoff? I can switch between users normally, but for some reason, my XP installation has begun taking 95 seconds to show the logoff screen after clicking logoff. It just displays the background image. The systray and taskbar are gone. I think this warning message in Event Viewer/Application is related:

>>Windows saved user RICK1\Rick registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account.<<

Can/should I reinstall XP to fix this? Can XP install over itself?

Thanks!