SR2 install problem

[krick]

It may be a problem, but I have found that Windows 98SE can survive even with only one free IRQ for the PCI  bus:

*snip*

More important may be the assignment of the four PCI interupt lines (INTA to INTD) but I'm not sure if it possible to display it in Windows.

You have ACPI enabled. This allows windows to build a "virutal" interrupt system on top of the 4 real IRQs. This shows up as a lot of devices all using the same IRQ, usually IRQ9.

In my experience, if you have PCI devices that won't share properly under a non-ACPI system, enabling ACPI isn't going to fix it. I prefer to not enable ACPI under windows 98SE mainly because I think the ACPI implementation is weak, but also because I find that it just masks sharing issues and makes them harder to troubleshoot.

In my experience, problems with sound card sharing are the worst, followed by network card sharing issues. Often, the devices will still work but with bad performance problems and occasional stability problems. The most common problem is static with creative labs sound cards.

When I'm building a new system, Before I install the OS, I spend a little time juggling PCI cards and making a map of which slot gets which IRQ line and which slots share with each other and also share with onboard devices.

Then when I have it all mapped out, I install my sound card in the slot that shares with the least items (preferrably none), and then my network card in the seconds least sharing slot. This usually ends up being slots 2 and 3 respectively.

Of course if all your devices are onboard, none of this applies as you usually don't have any control of how onboard devices share with each other.