IRQ's Win2K LOCKED ! (W2K)

[HedzMCP]

Hey again ;)
Please can someone tell me why some of my IRQ's have been locked by my ACPI Win2K machine. For example - my GF2 MX400 and my Onboard audio. I'm not able to uncheck 'Use automatic settings'. No matter what I try, these 2 devices will always end up on the same IRQ. I have no PCI devices and I've even tried disabling all other devices (apart essentials) I thought ACPI was sposed to be a revolution ! Gimme NT4 with DX8 anyday, if only.
btw MoBo is ECS K7AMA + 750Duron. Thx in advance for any replies !

[BertImmenschuh]

"I have no PCI devices..."

I think the onboard audio does indeed use the PCI bus. 'IRQ sharing' may be at work, what devices are not working? Try putting the video card in a different PCI socket/slot.

[POBrien]

I tested out on my box. Here's the results.

I went to device manager and selected View Devices by connection on the menu. Double clicked on Standard PC then went to IRQ steering tab. I unchecked use IRQ steering and rebooted.

result =

my modem, nic card and usb controller no longer had any irq's assigned. Yellow Exclamantion points on all 3. I checked the resource tabs on all three and the property sheets themselves were blank. No option to do anything.

I then tried the other two options in IRQ steering, rebooting seperately after each change.

The sheets returned but the options to uncheck auto settings were still greyed out.

I then went into the motherboard bios and disabled plug-n-play rebooted and seperately tried all three IRQ steering checkmarks each time. Made no difference.

So now IRQ steering is back on again with all 3 checkmarks as before with plug-n-play re-enabled in the bios.

* I did notice that no matter what configuration I tried, I could set manual IRQ assignments for the com ports and printer.

I tried to disable the plug-n-play enumerator but there was no option to do so.

I think 2000 takes over with it's plug-n-play and sets what it wants.

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[Andy-S]

There is a switch you can use in the boot.ini file that will disable the plug and play manager from re-allocating resources and will use the resources set by the BIOS. The switch is PCILOCK and the syntax for using it is multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect /PCILOCK.

With this switch enabled the settings should be as the BIOS determines and in most computers (Compaq is one) the IRQ's for audio and video can be changed in the BIOS.

[POBrien]

Hi Andy,

I tested out using all the same steps in my previous post. No go. :(

I think it's only relevant to NT 4.0. Hopefully the outcome is just isolated to my machine.

Pat

[Andy-S]

Pat,

The PCILOCK switch was added for W2K as NT4 doesn't have a plug and play manager. I think the idea was to emulate the BIOS control that was used in NT4. I, however have used several different switches with W2K and have had eroneous results, so I don't think it is limited to your machine. Did you try making changes in the BIOS to see if these were reflected in the OS?

Cheers
Andy

[CptBeyond]

Try setting the primary IDE controller to "DMA If Available" Then go check to see if you can change the IRQ's

I needed to change the IRQ for the CD-RW and DVD I installed. This was the only way I was able to enable the setting to be change

[POBrien]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the info. You're so right about NT. I remember that it had a file that could be installed to make it detect plug-n-play. I can't remember the name. I could never get it to work right.

Yeah, I enabled the assigned IRQ for the modem (11) but made no difference. I wish it did.

Pat

[videobruce]

That's the way 2k is designed. The cards share the same IRQ. M$ has a article on that issue. #252420

[kef999]

If you go into your BIOS and set PnP OS to No, the BIOS will handle the detection of plug n' play devices and allocating resources, rather than Windows. With OSs like Win2K, several devices are designed to be allocated to just one IRQ (usually IRQ9) but this is OK because, if you make that setting in the BIOS, the BIOS will dynamically re-assign resources. You still have to be careful about PCI slot-sharing, though, and with most mobos you'll only get certain devices to work in specific slots (because some of the slots will be shared). Your mobo manual should describe which are shared and which aren't.