I am attempting to build some file servers. I've got a lot of herwise useless parts laying around. For example, 20+ 3GB HDD's, and 20+ Whole PC's(K6 233's, 196MB RAM) I have set up one of these PC's with 4 HDD's. 1 for O.S., and the other 3 HDD's in a striped RAID array. I have some misc. older ISA controller cards laying around. I would like to install as many HDD's in the PC as possible, and I have all of my ISA slots free. I have tried installing one fo these ISA controller cards. No matter what brand, or type, I get an error at the startup of the computer.

"I/O error: 678" or something like that.

I think this is some kind of IRQ conflict. How do I fix it?

I just want to fix this.

XP only truely supports Plug'n'Pray ISA Cards, it ignores BIOS settings for ISA cards.

You could always install a ton of USB cards and get external hard drive enclousres but that would be a mess and cost way too much. Lol

Processor P4@ 2.6 Ghz, FSB@535Mhz
RAM 512MB's PC2700/32001 256 stick of each. Hard Disk Drives 1 40 GB HD 1 10 GB HD CD/DVD Drives CDRW52X

I believe this is plug and play. I just don't know how to fix the error at startup. It shows the arrow right afte it detects the IDE devices. Even after I press F1 to continue booting, the IDE device attached to the card is not recognized, neither is the card. How do I fix this?

I just want to fix this.

"I think this is some kind of IRQ conflict. How do I fix it?"

The problem with ISA cards is that they don't share interrupts like PCI cards. If you run out of interrupts, you are just out of luck.

How can I tell if I am out of interupts? I dont have hardly any cards in the machine. Just a VGA card, and this controller card. There have to be mroe intrupts than that, how do I set them?

I just want to fix this.

Well the system timer uses and interrupt, the keyboard uses an interrupt, Com1 and Com2 uses one each, the internal IDE controllers use one each. If you have a sound card installed that will use one. The mouse will use an interrupt. It is very easy to run out of interrupts. Thats why interrupt sharing was devised but it wont work with ISA cards.

Go to System Tools > System Information and that will tell you what interrupts are being used.

Stuart

I'm pretty sure you need some drivers for the ISA controller cards. You may not be able to configure more than ONE ISA controller card. Before controllers were integrated onto the MBoards I/O cards were the norm. I'm wondering if WinXP is even capable of supporting an ISA bus at all. You could find out by installing an ISA sound card and seeing if you can't get it working. I suspect you may need to back off to Win98 or earlier.

Hi
I have an old ISA Diamond modem, which WinXP Pro found and installed it's own driver for it wihout out any problems.
Maybe be I was just luckly.

dtech10

I don't know about being lucky. I really didn't know if WinXP can configure an ISA bus.
Voucherlive

If WinXP can configure an ISA bus then the issue may be the ISA controller cards all having the same IRQ jumper settings. Also, those settings MAY currently be set to IRQ 14 or 15, which are probably being used by the IDE controller on the MBoard and shouldn't be shared. ISA hardware probably can't share any IRQs with other hardware. Without a manual for the ISA controller cards it may be difficult to determine the correct jumper settings. Your MBoard BIOS may have settings to allow reserving certain resources. You will need to check that.

Hmmm 20 + 3 gig hard drives... There's only 60 gig there for starters.

I'd put together those 20+ computers and sell them for whatever you can get out of them and buy one big hard drive before I wasted my time & electricity running that many old computers as file servers.

Heck if you sold all 20 of them for $20 each that's $400! You could go out and buy at least 4 or 5 of 120 gig's or couple 250 to 300 gig drives and have a heck of a lot more storage then fiddiling with those old slow 3 gig drives.

I currently have a old p2 500 /512 mb ram with approximately 160 gigs worth of internal storage & 110gigs worth of external storage connected to it. Plus I still have 2 IDE channels to spare on the controller card I have installed in it.

ASUS A7V8X
AMD XP 2700+ 2.17ghz
768mb ddr 2700
nVidia 128mb FX 5200
WD 80gb SE
DVD R/RW

If I remember correctly an ISA IDE card will need an open I/O port plus an interrupt. If possible don't use the sound card as it usually takes too much resources. If the card is not plug n play there should be jumpers or a configuration disk. Non plug n play cards will need driver software as the OS can't detect them properly. Another 2 IDE ports will need two interrupts for the 4 additional drives.