IRQ settings problems

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris Rehm
  • Start date Start date
C

Chris Rehm

Well, it's been a long time since I've worried about IRQs, but here's
the situation:

Win XP Pro, P4 2.8Ghz 2GB ram, etc. PT800CE-A motherboard.

I've been experiencing a lot of hard drive problems, and Seagate is slow
to decide the drive is defective, so I'm pretty much testing everything
in existence at their request. Well, when they wanted to make sure the
drive was running UDMA5 they had me check the screen on boot to make
sure. When I did, I noticed what might be an IRQ issue that is causing
other problems.

In addition to hard drive failure, I have been having my audio fail on
occasion, and my mouse as well (USB mouse). Both of these fail once in a
while during heavy disk activity. I noticed that during boot, IRQ 11 is
assigned to IDE, Audio, and USB. So this made me think these were
stepping on each other at times.

However, when I went into admin tools, device manage, and looked at my
audio card (Creative Labs Audigy2) to change it to a different IRQ, the
Resources screen said my card was using IRQ 18. So I'm not sure what is
up there.

I was wondering if someone else might have a clearer understanding of
what could be going on here. I'd like to move the IDE control to a
different IRQ, anyone know how I might do that?

Thanks for any help.
 
Not sure if it's of any help but the primary IDE channel should be on 14 and
the secondary channel on 15. My sound card is on 18, so it sounds as if
yours is correct. (no pun intended) What about resetting your bios to
default and starting from there.

Neil
 
with the IRQ sharing system in windows XP you cannot change the IRQ's.
Somtimes there is a setting for IRQ's in the bios but usually that is over
ridden by windows. I would suggest you try to get new drivers of if you have
the new drivers try stepping back to the old one.
 
Mark said:
with the IRQ sharing system in windows XP you cannot change the IRQ's.
Somtimes there is a setting for IRQ's in the bios but usually that is over
ridden by windows. I would suggest you try to get new drivers of if you have
the new drivers try stepping back to the old one.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the info. I still have to wonder about the coincidence of
the three devices failing all being assigned the same IRQ by the BIOS.
However, they do get a different IRQ assigned by Windows.

I have been through the gamut of old and new drivers. I just cannot tell
what it is that is causing all these problems. Nothing seems to fail any
sort of diagnostics, but I continue to have problems.
 
Windows is not solely responsible for assignment of the IRQ's the drivers
for the devices do alot of that assignment. I have seen the wrong drivers
cause the problems you are describing. Id make sure all the effected devices
have current drivers. If all else fails do a repair on windows. Hopefully
that will repair the system error.Windows XP is very very good at assigning
the correct IP addresses. I have seen few to no problems.
 
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