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Serious IRQ Trouble with Gigabyte GA7DXR

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by slart58

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Alright... I have an IRQ problem that has stumped me dead. I'm running Windows 2000Pro on a Gigabyte GA-7DXR+ motherboard with an onboard Promise Raid/ATA-133 controller. (running XP1800 512DDR 2100 w/Nic, Soundcard, Modem, and ATI Radeon 8500 (AGP 4x, 128mb) I have a 25GB ATA66 HD and a 60GB ATA100 as well as a cdrom and cdrw drive. so i've got 4 drives and 4 IDE channels when i configure the two RAID channels to be configured as ATA133. I was going to put each of my 4 IDE devices on its own channel so that i could copy cd's on the fly and so that my ATA66 drive didn't slow the ATA100 drive. makes sense right? well, hooked 'em up with 4 IDE cables and configured my bios for the extra IDE channels but when I started up I had all sorts of IRQ conflicts. I had the BIOS configured to APIC (as opposed to PIC) IRQ mode when I installed the OS, which to my understanding enables the use of more IRQ's through software or something like that. The problem is that when I configure the BIOS automatically the conflicts remain when I get into Win2k. I get the same results when I configure the IRQ's manually in the BIOS. This leads me to believe that the OS reconfigures the IRQ settings. For some reason, even though I have full access as administrator for this system the options in Win2k device properties sheets for Resource assignments are grayed out. It won't let me configure the IRQ's in BIOS or OS and it doesn't configure them correctly even tho i don't have more than 15 devices. it seems to assign most of the 9 or so devices to IRQ's 11, 10,3, and 16/18 (the existence of the 18th and 16th IRQ must be due to the APIC enabled in the BIOS) Any information on APIC, PIC, IRQ config, etc would be very much appreciated. P Townsend

5 replies

by thechas

Yes, W2k and XP will override ANY BIOS IRQ assignments, and assign IRQ's to devices as it see's fit.

Most on-board RAID controllers share a hardware IRQ with one of the plug-in slots.

The first thing to try, is to move or remove any plug-in cards that share the hardware IRQ with the Promise controller.

I have had both sound cards and modems conflict with specific systems.
So, the next thing to try, is to remove both the sound card and modem.
If the system now works properly, you can decide if you wish to try the cards in different slots, or find cards with a different manufactures chip-set on them.
(make sure when you remove devices, that you remove them from Device Manager before physically removing the card)

As far as information on ACPI, here are a few links:

http://members.datafast.net.au/dft0802/

www.intel.com/technology/IAPC/acpi/index.htm

Chas

by csmith

I have done this, unfortunately (From your perspective) it worked. The only difference was it was a Win98SE PC, and no APIC engaged.
That points to the OS being the problem.
With only a soundcard, MODEM, and mouse as other peripherals, you should not need more IRQs.
Have you tried setting up the GA7DXR with just the two hard drives, (One per IDE channel) get it stable, and then add the CDROM and CDRW?
Regards, Chris

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