spurious 8259a interrupt:IRQ7

Post #53,871 by inthane-chan 9/29/02 10:07:40 PM Reply	spurious 8259a interrupt:IRQ7 So, I'm slapping Mandrake 9.0 on a system. Yeah, I know the answer to this already - it's install Debian. So, let's skip that and move on to the next part, okay? ;) System: Duron 850, VIA chipset MoBo (don't remember the exact chipset), 384mb PC133, 2x20gb HDs, 1 CD burner, Voodoo 3 3000, SB Live, Intel Etherexpress 100b. Boot to CD, start system, it appears to start the IDE driver, then locks during install. Here's a pseudo-dump of the last few lines: hdc: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 4096kB Cache, DMA Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12 ide-floppy driver 0.99b Partition check: hda: spurious 8259a interrupt:IRQ7 And then it just sits there forever and nothing ever happens. I've done the usual Google check, and nothing jumped out at me. The machine already has Win2k on the hda1 partition (only partition) and nothing on hdb. The machine has worked before with Mandrake 8.2, Red Hat, and Debian. And yes, I know the answer is "install debian." Any other thoughts? End of world rescheduled for day after tomorrow. Something should probably be done. Please advise.
Post #53,874 by Another Scott 9/29/02 10:20:36 PM Reply	Master/slave jumpers OK on HDs? About all I can think of...
Post #53,877 by a6l6e6x 9/29/02 10:43:10 PM Reply	Re: spurious 8259a interrupt:IRQ7 Well, the 8259 is the Programmable Interrupt Controller. Unless you are having a hardware problem, from say heat, my guess is that there is some screw-up in how the hardware configuration is understood and set up by the system. A spurious interrupt, to me, would mean that it was unexpected in the sense that the device that is thought to have interrupted did not in fact have an operation initiated by the system. In other words, the device is thought to have said "I'm done!" when it hadn't been asked to do anything. This could happen if the interrupt request (i.e. IRQ 7 in your case) is shared between two devices and the interrupt handler after checking the first device, which was idle, does not know to check with the next device's interrupt handler. Can you do: KDE Control Center \| Information \| Interrupts to see how things are assigned? Alex The sun will set without thy assistance. -- The Talmud
Post #53,885 by inthane-chan 9/29/02 11:06:15 PM Reply	Can't even get it installed. Win2k is up 'n running, Mandrake 9 isn't even close to installed yet. According to Win2k, there is currently NOTHING on IRQ 7. Bleah. End of world rescheduled for day after tomorrow. Something should probably be done. Please advise.
Post #53,890 by folkert 9/29/02 11:36:52 PM Reply	Anything plugged into... The Dern parallel port??? If not, plug a printer into it... you might be getting "noise" or the printer is on fire... Disable the Parallel port temporarily during the install... Okies... there... cya... HTH! `greg - Grand-Master Artist in IT, curley95@attbi.com -- [link\|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry/\|REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!] Your friendly Homeland Security Officer reminds: Hold Thumbprint to Screen for 5 seconds, we'll take the imprint, or Just continue to type on your keyboard, and we'll just sample your DNA.`
Post #53,895 by boxley 9/30/02 12:04:14 AM Reply	goto bios setup see what irq7 is set to it might be pointing to a spurious port so disable and try again, thanx, bill will work for cash and other incentives [link\|http://home.tampabay.rr.com/boxley/resume/Resume.html\|skill set] qui mori didicit servire dedidicit
Post #53,933 by inthane-chan 9/30/02 11:12:43 AM Reply	Think I figured it out. I've got 2 IBM 3070 20gb hard drives in this machine. When the machine POSTs, BIOS reports one of them as "IBM-DTLA-307020" and the other one as "IC35L020AVER07-0" Hmm. By the way, the Win2k partition is on the one with the funky name. Oh, and DMA mode won't kick in - I'm running PIO in Winders. Methinks there may be something wrong with the drive... (For the record: Both serial and the parallel port are disabled in BIOS. I tend to disable resource gobblers that I'm not using.) End of world rescheduled for day after tomorrow. Something should probably be done. Please advise.
Post #53,940 by deSitter 9/30/02 11:25:39 AM Reply	Re: spurious 8259a interrupt:IRQ7 Change the parallel port to ECP. -drl
Post #54,237 by JayMehaffey 10/1/02 11:02:17 AM Reply	Unfortunatly Unfortunatly, the message your getting is actually generic. Due to a quirk of Intel's pic design, IRQ 7 is the default assigned when ever the system can't figure out which IRQ it is. A lot of configurations generate this message randomly without messing up the system. In your case it seems to be reporting a serious problem. I'm guessing that what is happening is that the system can't connect the hard drive interrupt correctly for some reason. There is a good chance that Linux is locking up because it is trying to go into DMA mode where Windows worked because it silently fell back to PIO mode. You could play around with the boot options [link\|http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO-7.html\|Linux Documentation Project] but I'm not quite sure what you would need to set to get it to work. Jay
Post #54,254 by inthane-chan 10/1/02 11:55:32 AM Reply	That may be what I'm looking for... I'm certain it's the PIO v.s. DMA that's killing the system. Pulled the HD, and the system works just fine, plug it back in and it dies. Bleah. Your link should help, however... End of world rescheduled for day after tomorrow. Something should probably be done. Please advise.
Post #54,363 by lordbeatnik 10/1/02 7:33:27 PM Reply	try ide=nodma Try passing ide=nodma as a kernel parameter. I have to use ide=nodma on some systems with broken DMA to ide cdroms. Maybe it'll fix your lockup issue as well. David "LordBeatnik"
Post #54,396 by deSitter 10/1/02 10:56:27 PM Reply	also apm=off -drl

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