Hang at Boot Up

[PawSable]

I am at my wits end... When I boot my computer it generally hangs after the hard drive and dvd drive are detected. If I turn the computer off and on I can get it to boot, eventually; it seems that when the system "warms up" the difficulty disappears. I have the latest bios and drivers for all my hardware; I freed up the PCI slot next to the AGP slot; I have crossed all my fingers and toes; I even have taken up prying on a regular basis... no joy : (

My system is a as follows:
Abit BH6 v2
Pentium III 450
128 meg PC100 SDRAM
Western Digital 10gig HD
Sony DVD w/ Hoolywood Plus MPEG decoder card
SB Live!
IBM P72 17" monitor
LinkSys 100BaseT PCI NIC

If any one has any suggestions as to what I might try I would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

Mike "PawSable" Richardson

[RibbitMan]

Look at the numbers by your pci slots and make sure the slot you freed up is pci number one...it's not necessarily the one closest to the agp slot.

[FlyingPenguin]

Could be a PCI IRQ sharing problem (not the same as an IRQ conflict). Both the Linksys card and the SBLive are particularly sensitive to this problem.

Go here for more info and a fix: http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin/glfaq5.htm#5_9

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The Flying Penguin
http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin

[Jester[imported]]

Is your network card assigned an IP in Windows? If it isn't being assigned an IP either manually or through DHCP, Windows will hang for about a minute during bootup.

[PawSable]

RibbitMan -- I will check to make sure that the slot I freed up was PCI slot 1. The Abit documentation for the BX6 v2.0 (not BH6 as I indicated incorrectly) indicates that the slot next to the AGP slot is slot 1. I will double check.

FlyingPenguin -- Makes sense... now let me see if I can find a configuration for the four (also have a US Robotics PCI modem card I forgot to mention) in the five PCI slots so that I do not have a IRQ sharing problem. Strange that once I get booted up I have no problems with any of the hardware (well sometimes Windows 98 fails to "find" the modem but a re-execution of the dial-up program corrects this.) Perhaps I will just get the computer booted and leave it on.

Jester -- The network card is assigned an IP address in Windows. The problem I have is before the bios turns control over to the operating system.

Mike "PawSable" Richardson

[Yourdead]

I'ts probably you NIC card. After post BIOS and before windows starts your NIC network connections are initialized every time and this causes a delay at boot up anywhere up to 30 seconds depending on the network drivers installed & computer setup. No real way around this either.

My 2 cents

[FlyingPenguin]

I leave my computer running all the time - less problems that way.

The lost modem syndrome is a very common problem with Windows 95/98.

It really smells like a PCI IRQ sharing problem - I've seen this alot - especially with the Linksys and the SBLive. Try removing one or the other and seeing if the problem goes away (you don't need to remove the driver, just pull the card). As I explain in the link I gave you above, the solution involves moving your cards around. However, if all your PCI slots are full, you might not be able to find a combination that works.

If it's the Linksys card, you can try installing a 3Com in it's place. They're pricier, but that's one of the reasons. I rarely see a 3Com card have a problem with IRQ Sharing. Nothing wrong with the Linksys -I own 2 Linksys 10/100 cards, but they aren't as forgiving as the 3Coms.

Another possibility is that some device doesn't have enough time to initialize on bootup. You may need get into the BIOS menu and increase the startup delay to give whatever hardware is giving you the problem, time to initialize.

Most mobos have a delay time setting for this somewhere in the BIOS settings - or else you can enable memory testing on bootup which will effectively do the same thing.

Hope this helps...

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The Flying Penguin
http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin