PCI-MIO-16E4 doesnt work on Gigabyte MB running WinXP Pro?

[EngrTanveer]

I have a PCI-MIO-16-E4. It fails to pass the 'resource test' on a PC with a Gigabyte GA-7VKMLS motherboard (VIA KM-266 Chipset) and running WinXP Professional. I have tried NI-DAQ 6.8 and , 7, but it doesnt work. I amd using LabVIEW (EN) 6.0.2. Is there any chance that i specifically need to use NI-DAQ 6.9.3 to get the card working in XP (i.e., is is the case that NI-DAQ 7 wont work with the card in WinXP)? I am using identical SW environment on a Dell Optiplex PC, and it works just fine! Also, being desparate, I installed Win2K+SP2 on the gigabyte mainboard PC and everything is working fine! At this point I contacted NI support and it appears that Gigabyte (http://www.giga-byte.com/) and NI are pointing the
finger at each other, leaving me in the middle of it. Is there no way that I can get the card to work in WinXP Pro with this Mainboard?

[mhaag]

The PCI-MIO-16-E4 (6040E) will work with the latest version of NI-DAQ, version 7.1, and back to at least NI-DAQ 5.0.4. I currently have this board install on my machine with NI-DAQ 7.1 and Windows XP Professional. The problem you are seeing is not a result of incorrect driver versions and OS compatibility, but, as you suggested, may be due to a setting or configuration of the motherboard.

I would suggest that you examine the BIOS of the motherboard to ensure that Plug-and-Play (PnP) capabilities are enabled and that there are no other specific settings in your BIOS that could prevent WinXP from assigning resources to the device.

One thing that you should check is to see if WinXP is detecting the drive properly and if it appears in Device Manager correctly. Verify that it is assigned resources and that they are no other conflicts occurring. I would suggest removing all other external hardware (other PCI cards, etc..) as well as trying the 6040E in a different PCI slot. If you have not done it yet, I would delete the device from Device Manager and then move it to a different slot and let WinXP rerecognize and reassign resources to the card to see if that clears it up.

Also, the order of installation is important and if not followed has been none to cause these types of problems. Make sure that NI-DAQ was installed before the hardware and that all previous versions of NI-DAQ were uninstalled before installing a new version.

It sounds like you already spoke with an engineer here at NI regarding your problem, so they may have already suggested some of these ideas. Unfortunately I do not have a Gigabyte GA-7VKMLS motherboard available to test this device on.

Hopefully one of these suggestions will help you our or that another one of our users has the ability to test this particular motherboard. Please keep us posted if you have success or if you have any other information that could help us out.

Regards,
Michael Haag
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[EngrTanveer]

BIOS Settings: It has got 3 slots, the IRQ can be set to auto or manual, if set to Auto, the Card isnt detected by WinXP (I havent tried auto IRQ setting with Win2k). The BIOS does support APIC (25+IRQs instead of 10-12), but the manual option allows only some fixed IRQ (4,7,9,11) setting (on WinXP and Win2k, the OS assignes IRQ 19 or 22 to the card, which isnt the one I set in BIOS for the slot corresponding to the card).

If IRQ is set to Manual the card is detected correctly by WinXP Pro (if set to auto, the card goes undetected).

I have no other card in the 3 PCI slots, however, I do have a built-in sound card (Realtec), a built-in LAN card (Realtec) and a built-in S3 ProSavage graphics card. I tried unsuccesfully to get the 6040E working by di
sabling the sound and the LAN card; I even tried disabling my serial ports,LPT and USB controllers (and even my FDD controller) to give as much resource as possible: with no success. I will try disabling the built-in graphics card and install WinXP again to see if it is the graphics card thats the cause of the issue.

I have been advised on how to do a clean install by an applications engineer, and doing it as per instructions have not resolved the problem.

I tried with and without installing the latest device drivers from the Gigabyte website as well as generic vendors website (S3 Graphics, Realtec and VIA), with no success in getting my 6040E card to work on this mainboard.

I have been working with PCs since 1992 and i have tried almost all the tricks I know :), thats why i think its a problem not with NI HW and SW, but some conflicts between slightly non-standard hardware and WinXP Pro.

Working in win2k isnt a great inconvenience, but i miss the cool GUI of WinXP.