On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Sam MacDonald wrote: > OK now were talking IRQ's. > IRQ 9 on an ISA board is the cascade to IRQ 10 - # ehh? what would THAT do? the reason they cascade IRQ is because x86 architecture only had 7 IRQs to play with, and when they found that that was not enough(doh!) they added 7 more, IRQ2 was not used for anything critical to it was decided that it would become the cascade to IRQ9. (iirc IRQ2 was used for DAT drives, YES the original PCs came this a DAT drive port) Nowadays it is a moot point as PCI devices can and will share IRQs (supposedly :) The problem comes when you still have legacy devices on your motherboard, the ISA bus cannot share IRQs, Serial and Parallel ports cannot either. and i am thinking that a cheapo mobo kept stuff on the older ISA bus even though they did not install any ISA slots. For gits and shiggles tryanother network card, disable PnP OS and disable all legacy devices that you can disable. (floppy, serial, parallel, keyboard(maybe?)) on a typical system you should be able to freeup IRQ3,4,5 and 7. When you disable PnP OS support the BIOS enumerated and assigns IRQs and it eliminates(well, it should) any race conditions that you may get. I would recommend that you enable APIC and then fiddle with the IRQs, does the network card still enumerate? plug it somewhere else, you may need to plug it next to the AGP slot. Munir Nassar RedConcepts.NET http://redconcepts.net/ _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list