[RESOLVED] ISA cards holding my system back

hello, gotta system here that won't boot when any ISA cards are installed. i put a sound card and a 2nd lpt port in it and when you power it on the system does nothing. no screen, no beeps. it accesses the hard drive right when you turn it on, but never goes any further.

now if i take the isa cards out it boots just fine.

i did have these isa cards installed and one day it suddenly quit booting, and that's when i removed all the isa cards and it would boot. i can't think of any changes i made from the time it worked, to the time it quit working.

one isa card in any isa slot will keep the system from booting.

OS: Windows Me (Clean Install)
CPU: Pentium 200 MHz w/ MMX
RAM: 96 MB (SIMMS)

Drives:
1. Primary Master - WD 2G
2. Primary Slave - Seagate 4G
3. Secondary Master - Creative 8432 CDRW
4 Secondary Slave - Mitsumi 16X CD-ROM

PCI Cards Installed (3 PCI Slots):
1. Video - S3 ViRGE (4MB)
2. 3Com 10/100 TX NIC
3. U.S. Robotics 56K Fax

ISA Cards That Won't Work (that i have) (4 ISA Slots):
1. Creative Labs Sound Card - Model CT4520
2. LPT port

thanks.

Sounds to me like you have an IRQ conflict ot I/O conflict between the two ISA cards, or the Parallel port and the onboard parallel port.

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Agreed Paul, some more thoughts - maybe the onboard LPT was set to 2, IRQ5 and the card was set to LPT1 and somehow defaults were loaded switching the onboard back to IRQ7. This could possibly cause the machine to not POST. Try just the sound. Then pull the nic and modem. Try a diff isa card (another SB16 or whatever.)

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Paint your old laptop!

thanks for the reply guys. here's what i did, and here's what happened.

removed all PCI card but S3 video card. disabled onboard LPT and onboard serial 2. then i turned the machine on and everything worked fine.

turned it off, popped in the creative labs ISA card and it just sat there doning nothing.

powered the machine down and took out the ISA sound card and then tried the ISA LTP port, same results. anything else?

thanks.

It could be your ISA bus is blown. Perhaps you'll have to bite the bullet and change to PCI cards or buy another motherboard.

Bummer man, sounds like your ISA slots are shot. Have you tried putting in any ISA cards other than the ones originally in the system? Only other thing I can think of is to check the BIOS for resource sharing, see if it's set to allocate manually or automatically and switch it from one to the other.

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