Hi everyone,

I working on this issue for a few days, and honesty I have no idea

System:
- MS-DOS 6.22
- Pentium III (slot 1), Intel chipset motherboard
- Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA (CTCM/CTCU installed)
- Also tested with a Sound Blaster Pro 2 (CT1600) – same behavior
- LPT1 disabled, PnP OS = No

Symptom:
After a cold boot I get “digitized sound card not found” in games.
If I run Creative PnP Config Utility tests right after a cold boot I see:
I/O Port 220 -> Success
I/O Port 300 -> Success
Interrupt 5 -> Failure
DMA 1 -> Failure
If I press Ctrl+Alt+Del and reboot (warm reboot), everything works and the tests pass.

What I’ve tried:
- Two different ISA sound cards (AWE64 and SB Pro 2) → same result
- Different ISA slots
- Removed other expansion cards for testing
- Forced PnP/PCI resources in BIOS and also tried Auto
- Reset ESCD / “Reset Configuration Data”
- Tried both Manual and Auto resource assignment for IRQ/DMA
- LPT1 disabled so IRQ7 is free

Notes:
- On POST the BIOS “ISA/PNP device listing” often shows the audio card as IRQ 7, DMA 3,7.
- My AUTOEXEC.BAT normally sets BLASTER and runs CTCM/CTCU. Cold boot still fails on IRQ/DMA until a warm reboot.
- I also tried without EMM386 (NOEMS) – same behavior.

Any ideas what could cause IRQ/DMA to fail only on a cold boot? Timing/initialization quirk with ISA PnP on this board? What else should I check?

Thanks!