First post, by Bam Stroker
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi guys, long time lurker first time poster.
I'm having an issue with a network card on my 486 and I'm hoping somebody here might be able to point me in the right direction for a solution. I obtained the PC a few weeks ago and it's been going great, however it was becoming tiresome shuttling floppy disks back and forth as I copied games over from my main PC so I decided to invest in a network card so I could copy files over via FTP. I found a new-in-box ISA SMC EtherEZ 8416T on eBay, installed it and it worked great.
Today I decided to move ahead with my plan of replacing the 170mb mechanical HD in the PC with one of the SD to IDE adapters I saw on Phil's Youtube channel. I even went so far as to find the same one he had used:
I plugged it in and it worked great. I formatted it, reinstalled DOS 6.22 and and Windows 3.11 from floppies and then began copying the essentials over from a backup of the old drive. I even copied the old autoexec.bat and config.sys because I've spent weeks tweaking the system and wanted a 1:1 duplicate of the old HD so I wouldn't have any headaches, but turns out I've got one anyway!
With the original hard drive installed I can run the network card's DOS configuration utility and the tests go sweet and it will work fine in Windows 3.11:
However when running off the new SD to IDE adapter, even though I'm sure everything is set up same as on the other drive I get a message about it being unable to find a free IRQ:
The card appears to be configured the same way on both drives when I fire up the configuration utility. The following screens show all the same settings no matter what drive I'm using:
I've tried several different IRQ settings, disabling/enabling PnP etc. but nothing seems to have an effect.
Finally, here are some dumps from the IRQ page of Microsoft Diagnostics for both the old drive when the network card works and the SD to IDE drive when it's borked:
IRQ dump from MSD when working:
IRQ Address Description Detected Handled By
--- --------- ---------------- ------------------ ----------------
0 0F88:15B6 Timer Click Yes SOFTMPU
1 0765:1923 Keyboard Yes Block Device
2 F000:E36D Second 8259A Yes BIOS
3 F000:E36D COM2: COM4: COM2: BIOS
4 F000:E36D COM1: COM3: COM1: BIOS
5 0F88:1575 LPT2: No SOFTMPU
6 05CE:00B7 Floppy Disk Yes Default Handlers
7 0070:06F4 LPT1: Yes System Area
8 0F88:1505 Real-Time Clock Yes SOFTMPU
9 F000:E3BC Redirected IRQ2 Yes BIOS
10 F000:E36D (Reserved) BIOS
11 F000:E36D (Reserved) BIOS
12 118B:1DE7 (Reserved) PS/2 Style Mouse MOUSE
13 F000:E3C5 Math Coprocessor Yes BIOS
14 05CE:0117 Fixed Disk Yes Default Handlers
15 F000:E36D (Reserved) BIOS
IRQ dump from MSD when NOT working:
IRQ Address Description Detected Handled By
--- --------- ---------------- ------------------ ----------------
0 0F7F:15B6 Timer Click Yes SOFTMPU
1 0766:1923 Keyboard Yes Block Device
2 F000:E36D Second 8259A Yes BIOS
3 F000:E36D COM2: COM4: COM2: BIOS
4 F000:E36D COM1: COM3: COM1: BIOS
5 0F7F:1575 LPT2: No SOFTMPU
6 05CE:00B7 Floppy Disk Yes Default Handlers
7 0070:06F4 LPT1: Yes System Area
8 0F7F:1505 Real-Time Clock Yes SOFTMPU
9 F000:E3BC Redirected IRQ2 Yes BIOS
10 F000:E36D (Reserved) BIOS
11 F000:E36D (Reserved) BIOS
12 1182:1DE7 (Reserved) PS/2 Style Mouse MOUSE
13 F000:E3C5 Math Coprocessor Yes BIOS
14 05CE:0117 Fixed Disk Yes Default Handlers
15 F000:E36D (Reserved) BIOS
I'm hoping it's something simple I've forgot to install or configure but I've been at this for hours and my brain has stopped working. Hopefully it's not a problem with the SD to IDE adapter itself and how it uses system resources because it would be a real drag if I had to choose between it or keeping the network card working.
Thanks!