[minimustangs]

I have a pro-audio multichannel sound card (SEK'D ARC88) I'm trying to install under XP Pro, SP3. I get a message saying that the "IRQ could not be occupied". It appears to be sitting on IRQ 16, which is shared with my ATI Radeon card. This device's driver will not work that way, it says so in the readme.txt.

I went into the BIOS, changed slots (from 1 to 2), and manually set the IRQ for that slot to IRQ5 in the BIOS, one that appears to be free on my system.

The card still wont initialize, I get the above message again. Windows is still seeing the card on IRQ16.

I suppose that I should have installed this card right off the bat, but that was then and this is now, I had my reasons why that couldn't happen.

I'd like to manually change the IRQ setting in device manager, but I can't, clicking on the checkbox doesn't unselect automatic configuration. Could there be a reg setting that would unlock the ability to turn that off? I am logged in as administrator - in fact the only usre on this system.

Thought I'd post this to see what you people think. Next steps, I think would be to boot into Safe Mode and see if I can change the setting there, and as a last resort, un-install the card and re install it again. Perhaps in yet another slot, and configured to IRQ5 ( disablilng IRQ5 for the slot it's assigned to)

That for the read...

S~

[minimustangs]

I still can't assign the IRQ manually, however the card is now on IRQ18, and quite happy to be there. It's not sharing with my ATI card, or anything else for that matter.

The solution turned out to be pulling it from PCI slot1 and installing in PCI slot3. The difference? On this motherboard slots 1 and 5 share resources, so do 2 and 6. Moving the card to slot 3 eliminated the issue. I still have to reinstall my firewire card (slot 5), and my 3rd audio card will sit in slot 2.

Contrary to popular belief, you can have more than 1 audio card in a system, I've had 3 in mine for many years.