First post, by GunKneeNeon
- Rank
- Member
I have a RTL8139D PCI card in my DOS pc and been trying to make it work for days. I installed the MS clint 3.0, the NIC driver, added TCP/IP protocol and added the packet driver line in autoexec.bat. It has the same issue as said in this post. At its best, the "Initializing TCP/IP via DHCP...." line hung for a while then proceed to the next line without threw an error. It got a IP from the DHCP server but could not ping any client or its gateway. It could only ping itself either by its LAN IP address or 127.0.0.1.
I've tried a lot of things: changing the PCI slot, the IRQ, the cable, the router, the packet driver version(v3.40 / v3.44) and even the card itself(I have another NIC which is also a RTL8139D but with different PCB).
I tried disabling all the unnecessary devices(sound card, serial/parallel ports etc.) to free up more IRQs.
I tried assigning an exclusive IRQ for it.
Lastly I tried changing the I/O number. It didn't work when the I/O number is legal.
BUT!!! When I assigned the number to 0x300 as he does. It worked! It could ping the router and every client. I could map a LAN share folder as D:\. But in this case, the packet driver doesn't get loaded at all. It says "Error: <packet_int_no> should be 0x60->0x66, 0x68->0x6f, or 0x78->0x7e. 0x67 is the EMS interrupt, and 0x70 through 0x77 are used by second 8259M". Then I commented out the driver loading line in autoexec.bat and reboot. The NIC still worked as a charm. Why is this? Can I use the network without loading the packet driver? What does the driver actually do when enabled? What is the benefit to having it than without it?