IRQ Problem (santa cruz also) HELP!!

[xWeston]

I just bought a santa cruz card... i put it in and my system would no longer boot, and stuck on the win2k starting screen so i started moving cards around and things, took out my western digital firewire card and now it works.... I got the drivers installed and everything, but the only problem is - about 5 devices are on irq 7, and one of which is the santa cruz. Whenever i am playing music, and doing the smallest tasks, the sound will stutter, and i hear that this is from being shared...

devices on irq 7 are
Raid controller
network card
video card
via usb controller
and santa cruz


system is
Win2k
abit kt7a-raid with 2x30gig drives, Raid0
tnt2ultra agp
linksys nic pci slot 3
santa cruz pci slot 6
my firwire card was pci slot 2

what slot should i put this in or what should i do to make it have its own irq?

Weston

 

[shathal]

You'll have difficulties with that in W2K.

W2K uses ACPI by default, and thus IRQ sharing (usualy IRQ 9) devices get "virtual interrupts". As such (without removing ACPI at the W2K installation stage) you can't really assign IRQ's indiviually.

Also, assigning IRQ's to PCI-slots via the BIOS is of no use in W2K due to the way it works. You could pull that off in W9X based systems, but not W2K.

You'll either have to do a re-install without ACPI of W2K or leave the IRQ-sharing on - the card *SHOULD* be OK with the virtual IRQ sharing though ... thus the 6 devices on IRQ 7 are actually using virtual IRQ's (thus no "IRQ conflict" shows up in W2K).

Hope this is of some use to you ...?

 

[xWeston]

it helps explain some of it but....
it will stutter unless it has it's own irq
i put my sblive back in (which wasnt working when i was trying to fdisk my RAID setup) and it seems to work so i will probably just take it back, the santa cruz that is

weston

 

[shathal]

There is a way to disable ACPI at the install-level (so you don't mess up your system by later removing ACPI once W2K is installed - that is REALLY nasty). Although I can't recall how anymore out of the top of my head.

If yer happy with the SB Live stick with that, I would say. Neat card .

I am a bit surprised that the Santa Cruz is so choosy - surely they MUST know that in W2K it would be IRQ-sharing. Hrm - maybe their tech-support have a work-around or something like this for that matter? Might be worth giving them a shot - shouldn't cost ya, I hope - if need be, make it clear that it will be the difference between returning the card or keeping it .

Hope this helps somewhat .