G400 and Soundcard Conflict

[randypressley]

I decided to build my own system. Sounded like a good idea on paper. Anyway here's hardware setup.

Asus Kv7 motherboard Slot A /w AMD Athlon 550
motherboard supports AGP 4
G400 Mill Dual Head 32 megs AGP 2
WestDig 20G harddrive (IDE)
256 megs memory
Xitel Soundcard or AU8830
Windows 98

When I first installed Windows 98 before putting in the sound card everything worked great. I then put in the sound card and the system would hang when I went into High res mode. This was done by either running the Tech demo that comes with the G400 CD or by just changing the desktop theme to Dangerous Creatures. I then decided to reinstall W98 after messing around with the IRQ's just to start fresh. Then I started getting a different error with just the video card installed. I would blue screen intermitently
with a error in the VMM32.VXD driver. This handles the Direct Memory Access of the system. The system would also get this error
if I tried to reboot or shutdown. I checked the bios and changed a paramter called AGP Aperture from 64megs to 8 megs. The system started working fine. I then put in my sound card in slot 2. This uses irq of 10 for the sound card and 9 for the serial driver. The video card uses irq 11. The system fails to boot. It stops at the point where you should get the Windows 98 graphical screen. I then change the AGP Aperture to 32 megs and the system boots fine. But, the system begins to hang on reboot and hangs when running the Techdemo. I then switch to PCI slot 3 and the irq of the soundcard remains at 10 and the serial driver becomes 5. Each time I do this I uninstall and reinstall the sound card software. No change. I then take out the sound card and uninstall the sound card software and reboot. The system still hangs. I change the AGP aperture to 8 megs again. The system fails to boot. Its like the sound card changed something but when it was removed the change did not go back to the original value. Assuming I can never get this thing going, could NT be used instead? I want to be able to do home movie editing. I also have the rainbow runner which is not installed as of yet. I also have Linux, but I'm guessing that there is no support for the rainbow runner with it. Another option is Windows 2000 or Windows 95. My guess is Windows 95 will have the same issues and Windows 98.

[randypressley]

I was mistaken on the part about removing the sound card and nothing changing. If I do remove the sound card and software then change the agp aperture to 8 then I run fine.
Or if I disable the serial interface in the bios then I can run at 256 fine as well.
I would like to upgrade the sound card driver
but have been unable to get to the www.aureal.com web site in weeks.

[randypressley]

Last night I upgraded the VIA chipset to 4.23. After doing this I can set the APR aperture to any value and it works fine as far as windows starting and shutting down.
I still can't run the Techdemo with the sound card in place. I've tried version 6.0, 552,541,and 525 of the Matrox video drivers.
One thing I have left to try is updating the DirectX software. I noticed when trying to run the Techdemo on NT that if failed because DirectDraw was not installed. I'm thinking that DirectX is used by DirectDraw. I remember reading somewhere to make sure that DirectX 6.1 was on the system. I plan to do one better and install DirectX 7.0a.
Oh yeh I also tried putting the sound card in all the different PCI slots, but it still hangs when running the Techdemo.

[JohnT]

Do you have the memory hole from 15-16 MB enabled in BIOS? Some sound cards seem to require this to operate properly. I've read, however, that Linux is not happy with that fix unless it is patched.

JohnT

[randypressley]

Its FIXED!
Turns out the fix was a combination of things.
1) Upgraded VIA driver used the 4 in 1 download
2) Upgraded Soundcard driver
3) Upgraded Video driver to 541 (not sure if I needed to do this, however)
4) Put Soundcard in 3rd PCI slot.

PS: My bios doesn't have a memory hole option.