Technical & Support

PCI-PCMCIA

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Please Note... the information contained in our support pages is accurate to the best of our knowledge and belief, however Elan cannot accept responsibility for non-operation in any specific configuration.

Problems with the MSI 694D Motherboard in Windows NT

Problem:

The standard Microsoft PCMCIA driver does not work with this motherboard, so a third party Card & Socket services utility must be installed.
This problem occurs only with our original models based on the CL6729 chipset. (So is not observed with the P111, P222, P423 and P424.)

More Information:

On this motherboard, during boot, the system BIOS correctly allocates an IO base address of 0xDC00 to the CL6729 controller, the PSeries driver correctly loads and is able to use this address to identify the adapter. At this point the CL6729 controller can be seen by any drivers attempting to use the IO address assigned to the adapter so there should be no problem.
However, when the PCMCIA.SYS driver loads, for some reason, it re-enumerates the CL6729 controller to 0x9CFC. This IO address is invalid as it is claimed by the PCI to AGP bridge on PCI bus number 1, so no IO transactions are passed to the CL6729 controller on PCI bus number 0. The 6729 controller is then not available for access. When the PC Card (PCMCIA) applet is run from the control panel, it reports that "No PCMCIA Controller was found". If "Windows NT Diagnostics" is run, the PCMCIA driver claims IRQ 10 and IO address 0x9CFC.

Solution:

SystemSoft CardWizard 5.2 has been tested with this motherboard and can be made to work with the BIOS PCI IRQ allocation set so that all PCI devices share IRQ 10.
The reason for this setting is that there is a shortage of available non-shared IRQ's for allocation to PCMCIA cards, this BIOS setting (and possibly other combinations) fixes this. Sharing PCI IRQ's should not cause any problems on modern PC's.