USB Firewire combo card locks XP

[MRBOps]

I have a Tyan S2390 MBoard w/an Athlon TBird 1Ghz. It has 6 PCI slots. All are used. I'm set up for dual boot Win 98SE / Win XP. I pulled the existing firewire card and replaced it with a Hiesei USB 2.0 / Firewire combo card. It works when I boot to Win 98. When I select Win XP at the boot screen the system freezes. If I remove the combo card, and reinstall the firewire card, the problem goes away. If I remove any other card (so there are only 5 cards) the problem goes away. Any ideas?

So far I've tried:
1. Putting the combo card in different slots.
2. Booting in Safe mode (using F8 at the boot screen)
3. Deleting the existing USB root hub in device manager before installing the card.

 

[SDMguru]

Okay so when you try the F8, safemode option do you make it to safe mode or does it lock up still?

XP is not robust when it comes to changing anything dealing with IDE, Firewire, or other storage devices. I have the same problem occasionally when I change my drive or firewire config.

XP is supposed to have built in support for firewire if your new card is OHCI compatible. But on the off chance you have an XP driver disk from the card mfg. You might try installing the drivers first and then the hardware.

One more thing would be to delete the OHCI firewire device while in Safemode and then trying the new card.

If none of that works you are down to editing the HKEY-Localmachine- key in regedit.

 

[MRBOps]

Thank you for your reply. To address your individual points:

I am unable to boot in safemode. Using F8 brings up the menu of options. However, regardless of which I select, including safemode, it brings me back to the boot screen, and when I select Windows XP the system immediately freezes.

There are no Win XP drivers on the installation disk.

I don't think it has anything to do with the WinXP device drivers or registry because:
- The system freezes immediately after I select WinXP from the boot screen. The boot screen comes up after the PCI device enumeration screen but, I think, before the operating system starts to load.
- If I remove any other PCI card, the problem goes away.

I'm wondering if the BIOS is assigning separate IRQ's to the firewire and USB devices on the card, and if, with 5 other cards in place it is now having IRQ conflicts. If so I do not know how to diagnose or repair this. There is no ability in the BIOS set up to manually assign IRQ's.

This is all a guess of course so any other thoughts you have would be appreciated.

Thanks again.
-

 

[SDMguru]

It is definately assigning 2 (or more!) IRQ's to the card. What kind of motherboard do you have? If it is less than 2 years old then it should support the PCI enumeration that XP uses which allows 20+ IRQ's and shouldn't be a problem.

And XP loads it's first handful of drivers in the blink of an eye between the time the bios hands booting over to windows and the time windows shows it's boot up screen. Since firewire is considered a storage and network device it gets loaded very early in boot. I am still convinced that booting to safe mode (without the new card or old installed) deleting the OHCI firewire device and rebooting is a good step towards solving it.

If that doesn't do it there are several other things you can try but they might be difficult and require experience editing the registry and a bartPE boot disk. The driver that windows tries to load for firewire is something like sbp2port.sys and if that file is removed it might allow a boot.

I have had nothing but headaches trying to get anything other than a camcorder to work properly over firewire with XP pro.

Something else to try is in your bios select plug and play options or something like that and you might see something called "reset configuration data" this will force the computer to rebuild the PNP/PCI IRQ/IO tree that it reports to windows.

Most boards do let you assign IRQ's to each PCI slot but usually at least half have 1 IRQ shared between 2 PCI slots. If you have more than 2 PCI cards and 1 AGP you are already sharing IRQ's so I doubt that is your problem.