This has been working for a week now, and after a few tweeks on the right Realtek network kext's seems to be stable.
The system consists of
Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L board
2.8Ghz Dual Core CPU Q6300
Asus EN9400GT
4GB RAM
Second Realtek network card as the onboard Realtek chip doesn't default to promiscuous mode.
The kernel is set to 32 bit mode as it worked and there was little need to run in 64 bit mode for me.
I wanted to add a Firewire card as I use Firewire for audio and for my video camera. I have a two firewire cards, a VIA and a Belkin badged one.
The MB only has two PCI slots, the PCI-E slot is used for the graphics card.
If I put the second network card in the furthest slot away from the CPU everything (no firewire card) works OK.
If I remove the second network card and replace it with any of the two firewire cards, the firewire card is recognised and it works. The onboard network card works but I have to modify it using ifconfig en0 promisc to get Bonjour to work.
If I put either the network card or the firewire card in the slot closest to the CPU they do not work. If it's the Ethernet card then Snow Leopard reports that the cable is not plugged in, if it's the firewire card then the system profiler does not recognise it. Both are seen and correctly identified by the motherboard when it boots up. This is the second MB I have had with identical problems so I do not believe I have a bad motherboard as the POST recognises the Texas chipset on the firewire card.
So it appears that the first PCI slot (or the one closest to the CPU) under Snow Leopard does not work correctly no matter if the second PCI slot is occupied or not.
If I go into the BIOS the IRQ settings for the PCI1 and PCI2 are set to Auto. Oddly enough I can see that the second slot has masses of things sharing it and works, whereas the PCI1 slot only has a thing called COMM controller sharing it with either the network card or the firewire card. I am rather nervous of changing IRQ settings around as I have no idea how they work and what I should set them to.
Other posts have indicated removing the HPET kext as well as not removing the HPET kext in equal proportion so that idea has not been tested.
I have turned off as many things in the BIOS as I can, e.g. serial ports, parallel ports to try and remove this possible conflict but to no avail.
So does anybody have any clever suggestions as to what can be done to get both slots working. To summarise, both the firewire cards and the network card work in the second PCI slot, none of them work in the first PCI slot even if nothing is in the second PCI slot.
I am keen to keep both cards working as the second Ethernet card seems to work well and I haven;t had any kernel panics since using it. Of course that could just be sheer luck
Sorry for the long post, but simply whining 'it doesn't work' seems stupid, I have looked at this for the last six hours and am really scratching my head.
Suggestions welcomed.
Thanks,
Rob.
