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Peter 2007-02-13 00:05
The system was working; now it isn't. It simply will not reliably boot up with two video cards in it. Nothing has changed other than trying to play some games.
If the system is set to primary AGP display, the system hangs when booting Windows 2003 at the progress bar.
If the system is set to primary PCI it moves from the progress bar to the screens with a backlit view but no image - i.e. it's just about to initialise them to the correct video mode.
With either card installed by itself, the system works.
I've reinstalled Catalyst 6.11 and 8.083.1 FireGL drivers and it's not working again. I even booted into safe mode to ensure the PCI card was set as primary display (it is). What's going on?
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Peter 2007-02-16 11:23
Solution : interrupts; the joy of an ACPI system. Setting the 'interrupt' priority, and removing a couple of cards has enabled it to boot up without any issues.
I'm not looking forward to putting the cards back in - perhaps I'll have to reinstall Windows using the MPS kernel..
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Peter 2007-02-20 03:25
...still having ongoing issues - it was working, then went foom after uninstalling Portrait software's Perfectsuite v1.0 to install v1.3 (it changes the way other programs see display drivers). Had to take out the Soundblaster Audigy 4 - this seems to be a recurring issue. May put the Audigy back in now I've reinstalled Perfectsuite.
This is a Supermicro P6DBS motherboard (dual p3 1GHz 440BX) with onboard Ultra and wide scsi, a FireGL 8800 (basically an optimised Radeon 8500), a Sapphire PCI Radeon 9250, an ATA133 controller, an Intel Pro/100 card and a Soundblaster Audigy 4, running Windows 2003 server with an ACPI HAL. Although Windows 2003 has been fine for quite some time, I've always suspected the ACPI implementation as being slightly dodgy, hence the suggested move to XP with an MPS HAL (2003 is frankly overkill).
There's a lesson to learn about this multi monitor setup: it needs to run for several days with the machine having all power removed from it to be certain the configuration is stable.
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