Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 18:04:52 -0700 From: Joey Garcia <gummibear@we.mediaone.net> To: hardware@freebsd.org, questions@freebsd.org Subject: PCI and/or BIOS problems on Asus and FIC motherboards Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.19990710180452.00796560@we.mediaone.net>
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Hey all! I got some weird Motherboard-PCI-BIOS problems here that maybe you can help figure out. Okay, so I got two motherboards that are doing similar wierd stuff. One machine (the Win98 mamchine) has an Asus P5A mainboard and the other machine (the FreeBSD machine) has a FIC 2013+ mainboard. Both of them are using Award BIOS. Okay, it started when I put a quirky network card into the FreeBSD machine (I didn't know it was quirky then, but I had my suspicsions). Keep in mind that the FreeBSD machine is on the FIC motherboard. I booted it up and FreeBSD found the card just fine. It's a SimpleNet RealTek 8029 chipset based adapter. According to FreeBSD 3.2 it was detected and should be working just fine. Now, I've setup network cards many times in the past with FreeBSD and I've really never had a problem. This time, I tried to ping out to another machine and I got nothing. It pretty much hung there. Trying to do a 'nestat -r' did the same thing. I looked at the lights on my handy-dandy cable modem and there seemed to have been no outgoing traffic from the FreeBSD box. So I moved it to another PCI slot, and I got the same problem. Weird. I thought. I know this machine worked fine because I had another one of those cards previously installed. I had taken it out because it was a loaner from the Win98 machine. (Now now, I don't think that Win98 broke the FIC -- and I'll tell ya why). I even tried that original card (the one from the Win98 machine) and it still didn't work. But when I put that card back into the Asus machine (Win98 machine), the Asus aquired the same problem on the PCI bus. Although, the ISA bus seemed to work okay. After many hours of frustration, I had a friend look at it. He was stumped too. After screwing around with different setting on the BIOS, he was able to get the card communicating with the PCI bus it seems. Although, he's not quite sure what actually got it working. Another thing is that if I try to add another PCI card, it dies again. Both Win98 and FreeBSD are able to detect the card and install drivers for them, but the card just doesn't work. I tried re-adding (because it was removed in order to try to fix the problem) a bt848 video capture card back into the Asus machine, but it also did not work and neither did the PCI RealTek network card. Once I took out the video grabber, the PCI network card started to work again. Weird! It was all working just fine the day before. Now I'm kicking myself in the ass for trying to install that cheap network card. I should have bought an Intel. :( *sigh* My questions are: Why would this happen to two different motherbaords? What kind of problem would cause this to happen, and what in the BIOS actually fixed it. I figured that maybe someone may have had this happen to them and know how exactly to fix it, and I give thanks for any help you might have. Joey "Dazed and Confused" Garcia PS My friend that had gotten the two machines to start working again made the assumption that it had to do with ESCD, although I have no clue to what that is and how to set it in the BIOS. I sometimes see it at bootup though. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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