Won't Boot with Both Video Card and Capture Card Installed

[mikeh49]

Need some help.

I'm assembling a PVR test box with an ATI 650 PCI capture card and a Radeon 9600 video card. Had both of these running fine on an old Foxconn/AMD XP2000 motherboard. When I moved them to a newer ECS motherboard with a Sempron 2800, it will not POST if both cards are installed (long beep and no BIOS screen). It will POST as long as either card is not present. I tried two power supplies, one 385W and one 400W, same results (they were running fine on the 385W in the old box). Could this be anything but power? Could the cheapo ECS board have such poor on-board regulation that it can't handle the load? This ECS board was the main PVR for several years running a PVR150 and the Radeon 9600 with no problem, but with a different 400W power supply.

Thoughts?

[johnsonx42]

I doubt it has anything at all to do with power. It's a PCI resource sharing issue, probably interrupt related. Have you tried putting the capture card in a different PCI slot? Try them all. On many boards of such vintage one of the PCI slots shares an interrupt assignment with the AGP slot. Also, if your BIOS has a PCI resource assignment screen you can fiddle with the interrupt assignments there. Some boards also have a setting about whether or not to assign an interrupt to the AGP slot; in most cases you can run without an interrupt with little consequence.

Somewhere in your BIOS setup you should also find an entry that says "Reset configuration data" or something to that effect. Set that to yes and reboot. Once it POSTs, you may see a message at the end saying it reset the data... then shutdown and try again with the capture card installed.

In some cases it can be useful to disable any board features you're not using. Not using SATA? disable the controller. Not using parallel and/or serial ports? disable them. They all use interrupts and other resources.

If there's a newer BIOS available for your board you should flash it.

I have run into cases where it simply isn't possible to get a certain combination of cards to work in a particular mainboard. Most recently I needed a USB 2.0 controller added to a Dell server from a few years ago (server mainboards got USB 2.0 a lot later than desktop boards); using a PCI card with a NEC usb controller chip I went round-and-round with the cards in different slots, setting different options, bios update, etc. and I could never get the RAID controller, usb card, and needed onboard devices to all work at once. I ended up with a VIA-based usb card instead, which worked with no hassle.

[pBS]

also check if 'assign interrupt to video card' or something to that effect is enabled...
mostly just the 'reset ESC data' or 'reset config data' should do it..it does plug-n-play in the bios, so resources get re-arranged by bios instead of waiting till windows boots to do it..
it should post after that..
sometimes it's also called 'pnp os' which should be set to no/disabled...[so bios will do it]

and this is actually the recommended setting for windows os's too...windows can only re-assign resources while it's running, so it's only good for hot-pluggable hardware...
turning off the bios's pnp leads to resource conflicts until windows loads, and can prevent booting..
leaving it on solves pre-windows conflicts, and windows still does pnp when it loads so no reason to ever turn it off...

and sometimes turning off everything else[even stuff you eventually need] with both cards in it will get it booting and clear the conflicts, allowing you to tun on each of the other things 1 by 1 till you run out of resources...but having too many resources conflicting at same time confuses it..


so yea, what he said...

[mikeh49]

Thanks guys. I wondered about the resource/interrupt assignment and tried a couple of different PCI slots, but not all. I'll try the various suggestions and let you know what happens. I'm really looking forward to the video driver swapping, it has a Geforce 6200 in it now. Driver Sweeper is getting a workout.

[mikeh49]

Well. that sounded promising but it didn't pan out. I tried all the BIOS suggestions including disabling everything I wasn't using (serial, parallel, SATA, sound) and still nothing helped. I think it's just the incompatibility of these two cards in combination on this board. My experience with ECS/PCChips is that they don't spend any money on the BIOS, especially compared to ASUS and Gigabyte, so that's likely the problem. I have the latest BIOS and it's a 5-6 year old board, so there's not much use in pursuing anything there. So, I'll just stick with the Geforce 6200.

Thanks for the help, though.

[stustunz]

i know this is a long shot but how much ram do you have in the machine try only putting one stick in

[mikeh49]

I have 2G - 2 X 1G. I'm pretty sure I tried it with just one of each stick (they're not identical). Didn't work.

[Carlito]

I know on a lot of older boxes the pci video card has to be on the topmost pci slot in order for it to register in the bios properly. If you haven't tried it, I would suggest trying that and maybe putting the 150 on a lower slot...

[mikeh49]

The video card is an AGP 9600Pro and the capture card is a Theater 650 PCI. I've tried the capture card in every PCI slot and it makes no difference - won't POST no matter the slot. This is for a test box, not the main HTPC in my sig. Sorry for any confusion.