Graphics Urgent Help with Graphics Card needed (Hardware issue) SOLVED.

Here's the problem:

Afew days ago I purchased a second hand Creative Personal Cinema Graphics card. This card is a specially modified 64Mb GeForce 2 MX400 with TV tuner capabilities and a remote control.

First off, the card works fine with my old PII PC . However, I really want to use it in my 'multimedia' PC, which is a Dual PIII computer based on an Elite D6VAA motherboard with onboard HPT370 RAID controller. This is the problem. With the new graphics card in it, the system posts, gives a picture on the screen, and proceeds to detect hard drives, etc. When it has finished detecting hard drives on the RAID controller however, it crashes. This is just before the motherboard starts to scan devices for bootable media - the PC cannot boot into DOS from a floppy or off a CD either; it is definitley not a Windows problem. Ctrl - Alt - Del does nothing, the PC has to be hard reset. Moving the hard drives to the normal IDE controller fixes the problem, but I don't want to do this as I usually run the hard drives in RAID configuration, and cannot keep all the drives in the PC if I do so.

Any suggestions? (I have no more money to buy an ATI AIW btw )

 

hum... that sounds weird...

is there a conflict with the IRQs between the raid IRQ and another device?

is you bios up to date?

 

Maybe its not compatible with RAID...
well in the geforce 2 cards came out raid wasnt out so technically thats the only thing i noticed.. kinda like my old games that look like **** with Direct 9.0.. lol

 

If it is IRQ conflicts then I'm screwed. The BIOS is up to date, and automatically assigns IRQs, so I cannot change them. Incidentally, the motherboard (with its onboard RAID controller) was made in 1999, and the card was produced in 2001. I'd like to think that the parts will work together - this is the first conflict I've ever had with this motherboard, and its definitley the weirdest conflict I've ever encountered...

I'm off now to do some more testing. Will come back with results.

 

SOLVED IT!!!

After much experimentation, I've found a configuration that works. It seems that with the new graphics card in, the PC is very timing sensetive, especially when the RAID controller is used.

I got the machine to complete POST and begin booting Windows when I removed all old ATA33 devices from the RAID controller. I now know that with the new graphics card, for some weird reason, only ATA66 stuff behaves correctly. (Don't ask me why, but my 250Mb zip drive was especially bad - this was the device on the HPT370 controller which was responsible for completely locking up the PC when I first posted)

Even after this, the system remained unstable, and crashed during boot or shortly afterwards. Reducing the memory timings from 'Turbo' to 'Normal' seems to have cured this, although I am not yet sure if the PC is 100% stable, or what impact this will have on performance.

Given that before this, the PC was 100% stable and ran SETI and acted as a web server for weeks between reboots, I'm suprised that its taken this much effort just to change a graphics card...

Never mind.... I think I've cracked it. Thanks for your help and suggestions, gave me ideas for things to try in order to get it running.

 

Your welcome