AHA-1542CF and AUA-3020 USB conflict needs solution 2

[djeddiej]

Hello -

I believe I have a dma or irq conflict here, but maybe not. Need help nonetheless.

I was restoring an old computer, installing Windows 2000 Server (don't worry, its just a dummy machine for testing)on a Pentium 1. The specs for this system are:

1. a Pentium 1 200 mHz
2. an Creative Labs SB16 Sound Card - PCI I believe
3. an ATI 8 Meg All In Wonder Vid Card - PCI
4. an Adaptec AHA-1542CF SCSI 2 card, and attached to the card
5. a 4 Gig SCSI drive from Seagate.
6. a Panasonic DVD-ROM/CD-Rom Player (via IDE)
7. 256 Megs of whopping RAM (big for an old P1, hence its usefulness for...things)

The motherboard is an old Microstar, but actually has the latest Award BIOS from esupport.com

So after wiping out the hard drive, I have no problems installing Windows 2000 Server, and patch/update it up to the latest version/service pack etc.

Now the problem. I want to install an Adaptec AUA-3020 firewire/USB2 card. I install any drivers available from the adaptec site for this card. I review the manuals from the pdfs I downloaded from the site.

I power down, unplug, place the card in the slot, and fire up the PC.

The computer freezes halfway during the windows boot process (the load bar goes halfway), and I get a blue screen of death - the error reads "inaccessible boot device...if this is the first time blah blah blah".

I remove the AUA-3020 card from the system, and the computer loads into windows just fine.

The AUA-3020 card has been tested on other PCs, and works fine on their systems.

I read an amazon.com review indicating that the AUA-3020 card takes 4 IRQs, which suggested to me that it may be a port/irq/dma conflict issue with the older Adaptect AHA-1542CF and the AUA-3020. I believe I cannot adjust the IRQ settings for the AUA-3020, but the 1542CF should be able to be configed (I looked at the SCSI settings during boot, and yes, there are IRQ settings for the 1542CF)

Can anyone tell me how to resolve these conflicts? Anyone know offhand a good combination of IRQs, or the IRQs at all, the are used between these two cards? Its a little frustrating, and I am just one step short of closing up this machine (my dying serial mouse does not cut it - I need to use the USB2 mouse...)

cheers



Edward J. Apostol
Web Application Development Programmer
Toronto, ON Canada

 

[felixc]

You're right on it, your system is short of IRQ lines! It is already quite loaded before your new card.

You must free some hardware resources to use your USB adapter. Still it is not sure that your new Adaptec card will make it, as it is a resource hog. You really need both Firewire and USB?

Check into your system management, for the IRQs that are used in your system. You will get a partial idea.

In your BIOS menu, you may disable some of the peripherals that you do not need, like the serial ports and the parallel ports. They use one interrupt each. Power management and ACPI can also use an IRQ line. If you don't use both IDE channels, disable the unused ones. I suggest that you install an IDE hard disk and that you remove the AHA1542 instead.

The SB16 might use 2 IRQs and 2 DMA lines, if it is the ISA-bus version. The AHA1542 uses one IRQ and one DMA.

Finally, if your new USB/Firewire card does need 4 IRQs, it is possible that you could not use any other PCI card, and many of the early PCI chipsets had no more than 4 IRQs allowed for all the PCI slots. If you're lucky, the drivers might still make them work.

 

[djeddiej]

Thanks for the quick response Felixc.

I don't really need firewire per se, but the AUA-3020 was a spare card lying around, so I thought it should be put to some good use.

I am looking at my bios now...I switched the "Resources Controled by" from AUTO to MANUAL. Here is a brief of those settings

IRQs 3-5 and 9-12 : PCI/ISA PnP
IRQs 7, 14and 15: assigned to Legacy ISA

DMAs 0-7 assigned to PCI/ISA PnP

If I knew which ports I can assign to which cards, perhaps I can get the 1542CF and the AUA-3020 to work together. Its been a while since I did BIOS config, so if anyone happens to know which ones to disable for the printer (I am not setting up a printer, so the parallel port is unnecessary), perhaps the serial port too that would be cool (unless I missed something, they were not immediately identifiable in the BIOS).

There are IDE settings (hd settings) related to IRQ such as "PCI IDE IRQ Map to" set to PCI-AUTO, with ISA as the alternate. Can these settings be changed?
I am going to look further into the machine, but any help is always appreciated.



Edward J. Apostol
Web Application Development Programmer
Toronto, ON Canada

 

[LloydSev]

Windows 98 does not support USB 2.0

Computer/Network Technician
CCNA

 

[LloydSev]

lol, err not 98. Disregard that I must have been looking at something else.

Computer/Network Technician
CCNA

 

[LloydSev]

OK.. what I meant to say is, Windows 2000 had problems with USB2.0 before Service Pack 4, do you have SP4?

Computer/Network Technician
CCNA

 

[djeddiej]

Hi LloydSev -

I updated to SP4 prior to installing the network card.



Edward J. Apostol
Web Application Development Programmer
Toronto, ON Canada

 

[LloydSev]

Question
After installing the DuoConnect AUA-3020 AUA-3121 in the system, Windows hangs while trying to install the drivers for the adapter.


This applies to the following Product(s):

- DuoConnect AUA-3020, AUA-3121


This applies to the following Operating System(s):

- Windows Millennium Edition (ME)
- Windows XP
- Windows 2000

Answer
What may be happening is that Windows is trying to load the drivers for both the 1394/FireWire and USB buses at the same time and is basically 'hanging' during the process. In order to see if this is the case, you may want to perform the following steps:

1. Boot up into Safe Mode or cancel installation of the card to get to the Desktop. As a last resort you may need to remove the AUA-3020 or AUA-3121 to be able to successfully boot.

2. Once you can get to the Desktop, open up the Windows Explorer.

3. Open the 'Windows' (or 'Winnt') folder, then open the 'INF' folder.

4. In the 'INF' folder rename 1394.inf to 1394.inf.old.

5. Now open the 'System32' folder and then the 'Drivers' folder.

6. Find ohci1394.sys and rename it to ohci1394.sys.old.

7. Close out Windows Explorer and restart the system, booting up into a Normal mode.


This should effectively disable the 1394 portion of the DuoConnect AUA-3020 or AUA-3121. Windows may then be able to install the USB 1.1 bus, skiping over the 1394 portion of the process, and finish with the installation of the USB 2.0 bus drivers. After this has been done, simply rename the "old" files back to their original names and restart Windows. This will prompt Windows to reinstall the 1394/FireWire portion of the DuoConnect controller.

Note: You can also use this method of disabling the 1394 portion of the DuoConnect AUA-3020 or AUA-3121 to diagnose issues with the adapter if you believe that the 1394 bus or drivers may be causing a conflict.

Computer/Network Technician
CCNA

 

[djeddiej]

LloydSev this is an interesting solution...disabling the firewire section only. I will need to look into this one and follow up.



Edward J. Apostol
Web Application Development Programmer
Toronto, ON Canada