CTI Products PCLTA PCI Interface - Manual (Page 32)

PCLTA Installation Manual Troubleshooting
CTI Products, Inc.
68-11199-135
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9.2.2 Common Resource Problems under Windows 95/98
The following situations produce an additional drain on system resources that may
be hard to manage. Conflicts arising from these situations can generally be
resolved by selectively disabling devices to free up the required resources.
• COM ports that may not have a connector, but are consuming resources and
cannot be disabled through the BIOS
• Unused IDE controllers that can not be disabled through the BIOS
• Unused/nonexistent PS/2 mouse ports
• Sound cards that support both 8-bit and 16-bit compatibility modes,
consuming two IRQs
An additional problem often associated with sound cards in the improper
reporting of I/O resource usage. This problem may be recognized by examining a
device’s I/O address allocation for unusual one-byte assignments (since devices
typically use more). For example, if a device’s stated I/O range is 0x201-0x201
but its actual range is 0x201-0x204, a conflict will occur if the PCLTA adapter is
assigned an I/O range of 0x204-0x207. If this problem is suspected, manually
move the PCLTA adapter’s I/O range to a safer location to prevent I/O overlap.
9.2.3 Solving Conflicts under Windows XP/NT/2000
The device driver PNPLON.SYS implements the Plug n’ Play card isolation
algorithm in order to locate PCLTA cards. Since the PCLTA adapters are
completely Plug n’ Play compatible, the system BIOS will determine a useable
I/O port and IRQ setting. There is no user-configurable resources setting from the
Windows NT operating system.
Usually system I/O port resources are managed correctly. Often the IRQ
resources are not. The most typical IRQ problems arise from the systems that use
a SCSI controller to interface to all drive media. In these machines the IDE
controllers are not used, but are still controlling IRQs 14 and 15. The NT OS does
not know this and considers these valid, usable IRQs. Usually this problem can
be solved by entering the BIOS setup and assuring that both the IDE controllers
are disabled and that all IRQs not used by motherboard hardware are available to
the ISA bus. From within the NT OS you can check to see what the operating
system believes to be used IRQ resources by starting the “Windows NT
Diagnostics” application under “Administrative Tools”. IRQ resources that are
considered “in use” are listed here.