FIC motherboard problems?

[Echunta]

I have a FIC A503+ motherboard, AMD k6-2 at 400MHz, 128megs RAM. I was running W95 for many months with no problems. Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to upgrade to W98. The transition appeared to go smoothly but actually had some problems. I was able to fix the problems but the system was cluttered and such so I decided to reload from scratch (FDISK, etc...)

W98 installed well and I had no problem installing my Monster Fusion AGP (Banshee 3Dfx). The problems come up when I install anything else. When I put in my Monster 300 sound card the system will see the parent device and ask for a driver disk. Once it begins to load the drivers for the parent device it sees the other devices associated with it but then just reboots. 98 says it incountered an error/problem when accessing this device so it disabled it. It occurs on any PCI card that is installed not just the soundcard. I tried reinstalling 95 from scratch as well but hit some other strange problems. The 3rd time the system was loaded from scratch I was able to get the soundcard to install but sound playback was extremely choppy and completely unacceptable. What is going on? I'm running the latest BIOS from the FIC site and have tried what few ideas the site had available...nothing is working! AHHH! I need some assistance!

[Bleeding Edge]

Since you have Win98, you might as well use it.

Check your BIOS settings. Basic info of settings here: http://www.lemig.umontreal.ca/bios/bios_sg.htm

Track down all BIOS and Driver upgrades for your Video and Sound card if available.

Install Win98 with minimal (Video card only in expansion slots)

Update its BIOS and Driver.

Insall the modem and updated drivers.

[Update Win98 thru Windows Update.]

Install the sound card and do the same with the BIOS (if applicable) and drivers.

Check for weirdness.

Install the rest of the hardware and peripherals and update as you go along, one at a time.

This method may be (and is) the long way around but you usaully end up with no errors and a stable OS in the longer run.

[JimS]

Did you install, or reinstall the VIA IRQ Miniport Driver after you upgraded? This is a must.

[CMonster]

miniport drivers - yeah

BIOS Plug& Play OS = yes, IRQ settings= auto

here is another trick that sometimes works - boot with only an older PCI video card..install it..shut down and then install and configure the other components, one by one if you need to, then last fo all install the AGP card

[Echunta]

I did all those tricks, nothing worked. I was finally able to get it going though:

From the CMOS I disabled everything except for one ide port (for the CDROM). I also set the IRQ assignments to manual and PNP system to NO. I plugged in a SCSI card and drive and booted with a W98 Startdisk. After installing the system the drive was real sluggish to respond and the device manager said the PCI IRQ Handler could not be loaded. From System devices, I located the handler and disabled all of its features. After a reboot, the drive ran at full speed. From there I installed my cards one at a time. Now everything is working fine except the SoundBlaster DOS support says it cannot find an available IRQ, whcih seems to be true as all of them are now taken. This isn't important because I dont play DOS games under Windows. Once I ghost the drive, I will go back to my original setup (Auto IRQ in CMOS etc...) and run with my EIDE drives and see what happens. If it gives me grief, I'll load BeOS and be done with it.

[OuTpaTienT]

Did you try disabling the "IRQ steering"? I undterstand if PCI cards are giving you a problem, this could be the culprit.

You can find it in:
system properties/system devices/PCI bus/IRQ Steering tab

[hitman]

I had simular problem when I got my 503+ board and installed it. I never could load the irq steering driver. It would reboot before it got to windows (except in safe mode). I finally removed the driver from irq 5 (video card) and forced my sblaster awe64 to it(irq 5) and let the video card reload with a new irq. You can also, in the bios, not assign an irq to the video card and free up a irq. Goood luck