Some of you may not be familiar with BIOS/CMOS settings. However, that is what this post is about. Actually, one specific setting that is in BIOS's, the Plug n' Play setting. Reading up on it, I see that a variety of operating systems may have a conflict with this setting. What the setting does is allow PnP OS's to configure the PCI slots instead of the BIOS. Why it would do this is a subject I'm not going to address.

Suffices to say Linux, FreeBSD, Windows XP/2K may not operate correctly with this setting enabled.

Even the Win 9x OS's can get along just fine without it, so everyone thank Award, AMI and Phoenix for their stupidity.

Regardless, this caused a few issues for me and I intend to describe them, these are not likely the ONLY issues this setting will cause. So if you have this setting enabled in your BIOS just save yourself some fun and go disable it now.

My ethernet card was the first thing I noticed. It was detected, but it did not seem to initialize correctly. Making a change to netconf in Mandrake 8.0 would generate an error and ask if you wanted to reset the changes. Even if you made no changes.

A ifconfig showed no packets in bound or out, which for me could not be right as the card will automatically start communicating with my router.

The next thing I noticed is my sound was screwed. It was once again detected but it did not start and I could not get it to play anything.

The last thing I noticed was my video card, it was detected incorrectly, instead of an nvidia based card both mandrake 8.0 and 9.1 told me I had some SiS chipset. Now I have an integrated LAN, and an integrated Audio so if it had misdetected them, I might have understood, but I have no SiS video chiset of any kind.

What led me to think the plug n play was the culprit was actually 100% incorrect. You see I have a Netgear FA311 NIC which was identified as natsemi {which sounds nothing like netgeat FA311} and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz which was id'd as a CrystalClear Sound Fusion {which sounds nothing like Turtle Beach Santa Cruz} I initially actually assumed it was id'ng the on board {motherboard} chipsets which were disabled. So I turned off plug and play to see if that helped it use the PCI cards instead, I had only hoped the video card would follow since I actually had no sis video chipset. Lo and behold I had mandrake 8.0 up and running. So I decided to try 9.1 again. Bingo it worked perfectly but whats this, the drivers for the NIC were still natsemi and the sound card were CrystalClear etc.. I later learned these were the correct drivers all along, However, it was the Plug n' play OS BIOS setting that was the culprit with the two devices not properly initializing. I knew as soon as I got to the KDE boot screen and I heard sound. My thoery as to what happened, Linux was supposed to set the PCI devices up with their own IRQ, io.port, etc. and never did so the devices were technically in limbo. One might be able to manually set these themselves somehow, but disabeling the PnP option and letting the BIOS do its job seems the easiest solution.

Moral of the story Turn the plug n play OS setting OFF in your BIOS if you have one, its is a feature that actually serves no real purpose.

And this little tidbit reminds me I used to have to turn this setting off for Windows 95/98 too.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/windows/win...section-2.html

Seems hazy but I do recall having issues with my SBPro now that I think about it.