I have recently switched to a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard with onbord sata 150 + an additional ATA controller so technically I've got up to 6 IDE ports available.

However, When I turn on the second ATA controller in the bios the system starts to boot normally and then gives:
Disabling Interupt 16 (I didn't know there was an interupt 16)

The boot the locks when starting ifup for eth0.
Looking in the logs I see that the kernal has asigned interupt 16 to eth0 so i can understand why it locks from this point of view.

I have turned off all unused onboard peripherals to conserve interupts but this doesn't seem to help. Interestingly I can bring the SATA interface up without this problem. the kernal continues to assign interupt 11 to the Lan chip.

Any ideas on where to go with this would be appreciated. I would like to use the additional IDE ports to spread the load across the disks without using two disks per ATA port . I am also considering rebuilding my server using this motherboard as the eth0 is gigabit enabled and the 6 physical ports should handle heaps of hard drives.

Any advice appreciated.
Regards
David Skinner

Ok - found a fix - I needed to add acpi=no to lilo.conf It appears this is a Mandrake problem (possibly only with certain motherboards) and exists in 9.2 and 10.

Hope this helps someone.