Adding Hard Drives and IRQ Conflicts

[Paul King]

Hello

I have an ASUS AV7-133 motherboard using an Athlon K7 processor, and I have 
found to my horror that I have umpteen devices all sharing IRQ 9. This 
includes: 
    ACPI (not sure what that is)
    Video card
    My sound card
    My ethernet card
    On-board USB ports
    PCI card USB ports
    My PCI Ultra ATA card (connected to one drive)

On my XP system, I found this while looking into the "System Information" 
spawned by my Palm Desktop application. I find it rather odd that all these 
devices are drawing on only one IRQ. 

In fact, I can't think offhand of anything I have that isn't going through IRQ 
9. Unless you count the on-board ATA controllers. I suspect that this is not 
the operating system's fault. This is hardware-based.

I have a new hard drive that uses my PCI ATA card. When it is connected and 
powered up, things work OK for a while, then I hear a "click" inside the box 
(sounds like a hard drive "click"), then the operating system freezes 
indefinitely (no mouse, no keyboard) until I reboot it. The obvious problem 
here is with open files, and indeed many files got corrupted. Removing the hard 
drive removed the freezing problem.

For anyone who knows more about hardware than me: does it actually sound like 
an IRQ conflict (haven't heard of that problem in years). It appears that there 
is an upper limit on the number of devices on the same IRQ until the system 
starts to get confused.

Paul King

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