Since I ask for help so often I thought I'd offer some for a change.

My 386 is pretty packed. As such it's a PITA to set everything up because of resource conflicts. I have:

1 x SCSI controller card
1 x ATI Wonder video card
1 x CT 2740 SB16 card
1 x 56k modem
1 x Microsoft NIC (a really good one... forgot the model)
1 x expansion card for LPT, game, serial, etc.
1 x free 8-bit slot
...and I feel like there's 1 more but without being in front of the machine I can't recall

Anyway I was starting fresh and wanted to start loading dos, windows, etc. so first task was to get the SCSI working... and I've never done that before so I was lucky it worked.

First I had to set the jumpers differently because the default memory address caused a fault that made the bios fail to boot. Once I picked an alternate memory address via jumpers, that fixed itself. Then the HDD wouldn't detect because it was on channel 2 on the cable and the BIOS was looking for something on channel 0. To fix that I just turned on all the features in the BIOS including something that sounded like "auto detect" and that fixed that problem. Then the HDD would hang the boot sequence because it wasn't formatted enough for the BIOS to detect it so I had to do a low-level format on it right from the BIOS features.

OK now the HDD works. I used a 5.25" floppy to boot up dos enough to run fdisk and set up a primary c partition. Then I installed DOS 6.22 for real.

With a C drive and DOS installed, next I installed Windows 3.11 from floppies because my CD-ROM didn't work. My CD-ROM didn't work because it's IDE and as yet I have no means to interface with it for lack of an IDE controller. Windows went on fine and attempted to set up some of the hardware it found installed. This included my NIC. Here's where things get messy.

Windows likes to set up your hardware for you and change your autoexec and config files. Before it does this, it asks you to verify the IRQ, DMA and memory locations it picks. I didn't have a problem with it so I said ok to the defaults. Now windows is installed and detects my NIC.

Now I decide to go install my sound card. It happens to have an IDE style connector on it and my hope was that by installing the sound drivers, maybe I could get my CD-ROM to work. So I'm going through the wizard and it also wants me to verify the IRQ, DMA and memory locations it picked. No problem with them so I continue. Reboot the machine.

Boot-up seems ok until the mixer setup tries to happen and then... nothing. I wait about a minute before getting the C drive access error (Abort, Retry, Fail... that thing). I hit abort and then I get a line that appears to be for the NIC. It also fails. Every subsequent step fails and the hard drive appears to be dead. No activity.

So at this point I thought I'd killed my hard drive but no, that wasn't the case. It would continue to boot half way each time and only die on the same line of code. Also if I booted from a floppy I could access the c drive no problem. So what happened after I installed my sound drivers?

I don't know yet but I have a STRONG suspicion that I have an IRQ/DMA/Memory conflict between the sound card and either the NIC or the SCSI. I'm pretty sure the SCSI IRQ was assigned to 11 and the NIC to 5 (3 and 4 warned me not to use them). You see old computers like mine only have 15 (16?) interrupts and almost all of them are reserved for something. There's a couple of spares but for the most part, you can't just pick a number out of thin air. I think when I installed my sound card and it wanted to default to IRQ 5, that conflicted with my NIC and I think the memory location of 330H conflicted with my SCSI because I had to change that with jumpers at the very beginning from 130H, which didn't work. So how in the hell do we know what we can assign and when?

If you have a barebones machine with little on it, this usually won't be a big problem but if it's packed like mine is, you need a reference. Thankfully I found one:

http://www.pchell.com/hardware/irqs.shtml

In this page it tells you what all the IRQs, DMAs and memory locations are typically used for so that you can pick them so they don't conflict.

Since Sound Blaster cards are so pervasive in old computers and every piece of software with a sound setup in it typically defaults to the numbers Creative likes to use, I recommend giving priority to the sound card and allowing it to use its defaults. This means finding a SCSI jumper combination that uses an unused part of memory. IRQ 11 should be fine though. As for the NIC, don't use IRQ 5 like I did. Try IRQ 10, as it seems the only one that won't cause havok. Remember that memory locations 220 and 330 are usually reserved for the sound card so try not to use them for either the SCSI or the NIC. And since DMA channels appear to allow the most flexibility, leave that part till last. If none of the defaults conflict, leave them alone, otherwise pick a free DMA channel.