On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Jeremy Kersenbrock wrote:
> What does USB have to do with this? I understand how diabling USB would free
> up an IRQ, but this Intel nic will always take IRQ11 unless I find a way to get
> the DOS setup program to run. It doesn't even run when I shutdown and reboot
> in MS-DOS Mode. (Intel is no help, BTW. I've had a message posted on their
> support forum for 2 weeks without a reply.)
>
> Before I installed my problem eepro100, I installed another one in a machine
> withough AGP, and it worked fine. I started with several free IRQ's (7, 10, and
> 11 if I remember correctly), and it took 11.
>
> I cannot change the IRQ's in my BIOS. My only BIOS options are to select
> "Legacy ISA" or "PCI/ISA PnP" for each IRQ. Needless to say, changing IRQ11
> from "PCI/ISA PnP" to "Legacy ISA" will only result in the nic (and likely my
> AGP card also) not working at all.
>
> Lastly, someone suggested that I might have an el-cheapo motherboard that isn't
> handling PCI right. Possible, but shouldn't be. I have a Soyo 5EHM v1.1 with
> Award BIOS v4.51PG on a VIA MVP3 chipset. It is supposedly PCI2.1 compliant.
> But it does do some weird stuff with it's drivers. One of the Windows drivers
> that come on the installation disk with the mobo is a "IRQ Remapping utility",
> so maybe it's IRQ's are all messed up.
>
> Finally, before I go buy a 3com nic. Can I set the IRQ on a 3com PCI nic?
> Preferably from Linux or Windows (I am rarely not disappointed by DOS.) It
> will have to be able to use an IRQ other than the traditional IRQ10, because
> it's already taken (by some serial motherboard resource, I don't recall which
> one). If not, I'll buy a 10BaseT ISA nic and sacrifice 10/100 compatibility for
> one that I can set the IRQ on and actually use.
>
Jeremy,
>From what I know about my own past experience with similar cards, you're
right, if your motherboard won't let you assign irq's to certain pci slots
in the bios, you're pretty well SOL. My personal advice would be to find
a nice pci 10/100 card based on the RTL8139 chipset. I'm running one here
and have had absolutely no problem with conflicts with IRQ's at all, and
I've seen it grab damned near any interrupt available if there are other
cards installed.
As to the comments re: USB, I was thinking that in the future, once USB is
fully supported in the 2.4 kernel, you'd have to come up with a different
plan if you ever needed support for the USB and wanted to keep that Intel
card.
Another question I have for you re: the setup program for that nic, have
you downloaded and tried the latest copy of their drivers with the setup
program included? Might be the solution to your problem.
Rich
