[linux-audio-user] M-Audio Delta 1010 - Netgear Ethernet Card incompatibility

[steve d]

Just for information and the archives.

There seems to be an incompatibility between the M-Audio Delta 1010 
PCI card and a Netgear PCI Ethernet card.

I use the Netgear ethernet card for a DSL Internet connection.

Several days ago I received the Delta 1010 breakout-box/PCI-card audio 
card. When I installed it into an empty PCI slot and turned the 
computer on, it hung even before a user can access the BIOS. All the 
LEDs on the computer case were on (power, hard disk activity, DVD+RW 
drive activity) but the computer wouldn't boot or even get to the 
point where I could drop into BIOS.

After dozens of troubleshooting configurations, including moving PCI 
cards around to different slots (a Soundblaster card, a US Robotics 
5610B modem card, the Netgear ethernet card and the Delta-1010 card), 
taking all the cards out, putting the cards back in one at a time, 2 
at a time, etc., I discovered that the boot-up hang was caused by the 
Delta 1010 and the Netgear ethernet cards, regardless of which slots 
they were placed in and regardless of experimenting with BIOS 
settings when I could get the computer to boot (when the ethernet and 
Delta cards were not both in the machine at the same time).

The motherboard is a Tyan Tiger MPX S2466N-4M dual-AMD-Athlon-CPU 
board and has an onboard ethernet port I never used (because I 
already had the netgear ethernet card and was lazy), so the solution 
in my case was to permanently remove the Netgear ethernet card from 
the PCI slots and jumper the motherboard to use its own ethernet 
port, then configure FreeBSD and Debian Linux to use that ethernet 
port.

But the mystery remains. Why does an M-Audio Delta 1010 PCI card 
conflict, at such a low level, with a Netgear Ethernet card? Does it 
only happen with Netgear cards? Does it only happen with a Tyan S2466 
motherboard?

Anyway, I wrote this just to share the information and for the 
archives. Best wishes,

-steve d
NM US
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