sb live and apology
 

Greetings all. I realise it's a rather unusual thread but I urge your patience. A while ago I reported a very unusual problem with my sb live and it was montsh of suggestions and no luck of getting it to work propertly. I recetly decided to install the sb live again...but as soon as i crawed under the desk and glaced a teh motherboard ...it hit me ..why not try a different pci slot. ...after trial and error ..I found one, on which the good old sb live works perfectly. Now my hardware knoledge is ...very poor, but it seems tha the onboard audio has a registered IRQ 5, and when I disable it, and install the sb live in that concrete pci slot, it also indicates interrupt request 5 ....On other slots it wouldn't work propertly or the kernel would hang on trying to load the driver module during boot. Seriousely, i've googled on it more than a year now, nothing like it ...thoughts anyone ?

Well, first, as far as I know (which may not be very far), IRQs have no hard connection to any specific hardware slot. (Although you might be able to force it in your BIOS.)

But a PCI board's contacts can get tarnished, and physically moving the board can scrape the contacts so they can, thereafter, connect properly. You could test my theory by putting the board back to where it was, and seeing if it still works.

Or, even simpler, the board may not have been fully inserted and, again, by moving it you may have, finally, gotten it all the way into a mother board slot.

I apreciate the reply.It did accur to me to test again by moving it ...and I did....it only works in this particular slot. It does work on one more, but the input/output timing of sound there is terribly miscalculated...which was my problem a year or so ago. ..And yeah, that was when my hopes of ill-insertion died, a year or so ago. It's curious tho, the motherboard's autodetection sysem assigns irq 5 to the card only on this slot.On two of the slots two of the slots the card isn't even detected, on one of them an irq isn't assigned to it, and it works on two, fully operable only on one. The values and slot positions seem to be constant even after...substantial testing.

Is it a generic motherboard, or a special?
I'm not very good on hardware either, but it seems some of the computer "brands" do their own thing. May be on your motherboard the PCI slots were only meant for specific cards.
Doesn't seem very probable now I've writen it, but neither does your problem.

bouth everything from a very nice hardware store in neat boxes and assembled the machine mysef, ...so it seems unlikely to me....considering that tehre is one slot which the card works on , it's not really a problem ..but somewhat of a mystery to me.i'm verse enough in hardware to assemble a machine and get it to work propertly ...i just haven't seen anything like this before. thought someone here might have ...

A thought: Are you sure those are all PCI slots? Some boards have, e.g., an AGP slot and some old AT slots. PCI cards are not supposed to be able to be inserted in the other kinds of slots, but they do occasionally do so.

In fact, if I recall correctly, the older AT slots were longer than the newer PCI ones, but some PCI cards would fit into the older slots. (Of course, they wouldn't work in them, but they would fit into them.)

Conversely, perhaps your SB card is an older AT card, and it only works in an AT slot.

All this is speculation, from memory. I just checked the specs on my desktop systems, and all the m/b in them have been upgraded to more recent versions, so I don't have one with the older slots in it to use to refresh my (old man's) memory.

actually i think it is the soundcard. i have the same soound card on a modern system. no AT slots and no agp slots. The sound card only works in one pci slot. i dont know why, bu it works fine for me there.

From my own experiences IRQs can be funny things to sort out. On some motherboards they are fixed, some you can move.

For example,

PC Chips SIS based
This is a microATX with 1x AGP and 2x PCI. The AGP and 1 PCI share there IRQ. Also the onboard USB and the other PCI share. There is no way in the bios to change this.

ASUS, VIA based
A full ATX board. 1x AGP 5x PCI. The AGP and 1 PCI share, Onboard USB and a PCI share, Onboard Ethernet and a PCI share and the Onboard sound shares with a PCI. However on this board I can set the IRQs to auto or set them myself in the BIOS. But the PCI slots will always share with an on board devices that is enabled.


These are just two examples of the boards I have.
If you have a look at this on wikipedia it explains about IRQs. As you will see there are only 7 user assignable IRQs to use. But if you have serial or parallel ports setup then you only have 4 free IRQs. The rest are fixed by the system and can not be changed (unless you completely rewrite the BIOS, CPU instructions and rewire the motherboard, but then it won't be x86 compatable).

So say you only have 4 free IRQs you have to juggle these about with network adaptors USB, Firewire, sound cards, extra IDE ports, SCSI and anything else that you might want to install. In the end you will have to share IRQs and you are going to get some conflicts.

:)

snowtiger did some digging. well yeah.seems normal enough now ...thanks you guys, i consider the topic closed now, let's not take up any more LinuxQuestiosn users attention :P ...just for the sake of facts,
the motherboard was is an Epox 9NDA3I, 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP 8x slot, s.939