Run out of interrupts on pa2013

I've run out of interrupts on my pa2013 even though interrupt steering
is enabled. Does this seem likely given that i only have an AGP card,
ethernet card and 2 USB ports card?

 

What kind of problems are you running into, exactly? Usually, IRQ
sharing between PCI devices should work just fine, but sometimes there
are components that break the rules and do not behave as they should.

Is your computer freezing part of the way through the boot process? If
so, at which part does it freeze? As it is loading Windows? Is this
related to the 40 GB hard drive post you made earlier?

Does the machine boot if you remove the USB card, or disable the onboard
USB controller? I have heard of conflicts between PCI USB cards and
onboard USB ports based on early VIA chipsets.

You did not mention a sound card. Do you have one installed? If so,
have you tried removing it? Sometimes sounds card drivers that still
try to emulate the old SB16 card in Windows run into IRQ problems with
PCI devices. There are often ways around this, but it depends on the
sound card.

--Alex

 

The sound card is a PCI Creative Soundblaster and its legacy driver
doesn't have an interrupt available for it. I disabled the parallel
port to free up its interrupt and everything works fine now.

 

Ohhh, yeah. I remember those. For the Sound Blaster PCI cards in
Win98, try going to Device Manager --> Creative SB Emulation -->
Settings --> check "Allow LPT Interrupt Sharing". Hit Apply and OK and
reboot.

The Creative SB Emulation will probably be under "Sound, video and game
controllers" or under "Creative Miscellaneous Devices".

Other sound cards (like the SB16 emulation in Aureal sound cards) made
you do weird things like go into the PCI/PnP Configuration section of
the BIOS to reserve an IRQ for the SB16 emulation. Ugh.

On the other hand, if you are fine with disabling the LPT port, then you
may just stick with that. It took me a little while to remember this
stuff, since I had dealt with it in a while. It happened to pretty much
any computer that used Win98, not just the PA2013. What a pain.

Anyway, glad you got it running.

--Alex

 

When you boot the board, it should show which BIOS you're using. On the
board somewhere should show what Rev> you have. Give it a try. What's the
hurt. Just don't let any factory smoke out