Re: A Problem

[Peter Mount <peter@retep.org.uk>]

Thomas Droege wrote:
> Well, I played with the BIOS.  The most recent thing that I did was to set
> UART2 from normal to the other possible setting.
> 
> Then it worked.  Then I tried setting back to the old value.  It worked. 
> Now I cannot find a mode where it does not work.
> Last I set it to all the default values and it worked.  
> 
> Sigh!
> 
> There seem to be two possibilities:
> 
> 1)  It is a warm up problem.  The card works only after it has run a while
> and has warmed up.  This is definitely possible. 
> 
> 2)  It is a BIOS initilization problem.  The BIOS starts out in some funny
> state.  Changing anything resets it so that the ISA bus works. 

This is a possibility, although the only time I've seen it occur is 
after upgrading the BIOS. The new version changes the format stored in 
NVRAM and strange things happen until you reset it.

What could have happened was that during manufacture the NVRAM was 
configured for an earlier BIOS version to the one actually loaded. Most 
likely if the manufacturer used a tool to load the setup rather than the 
BIOS itself.

Peter