An ISA card WinXP problem

NTDEV
1

I’m facing the following problem:
An old, really old non PnP EISA ARCNET card is to run under WinXP on an industrial PC. The ISA bus is accessed through 2 PCI bridges - an 82801BA PCI to PCI and an IT8888 PCI to ISA SMB. For operation the board needs access to I/O, on-board memory and an IRQ line. As it is “dumb”, there is no way to tell the bridge driver(seems to be isapnp.sys) to claim these resources on boot time. Is there a way to make the bridge claim these resources and make them available to the ISA board without digging down to the driver code level? The ISA has a Win2K device driver - I wrote it some 10 years ago.
Thnx in advancd - any hint will be appreciated!
Regards

2

>digging down to the driver code level? The ISA has a Win2K device driver - I wrote it some 10 years

Just reuse the w2k driver.

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

3

I thought the same but after re-reading the post I am wondering if the issue
is that the system has no idea there is an ISA bus attached beyond those
bridges.

Cheers,
Dave Cattley

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Maxim S. Shatskih
Sent: Friday, April 16, 2010 8:45 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re:[ntdev] An ISA card WinXP problem

digging down to the driver code level? The ISA has a Win2K device driver -
I wrote it some 10 years

Just reuse the w2k driver.

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

4

Thanks for answering!
The system sees the ISA - an old ISA PnP 3Com network card is recognized and is working. But it is not seeing the non PnP hardware and when the driver is started it don’t receives any resources.

5

wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> Thanks for answering!
> The system sees the ISA - an old ISA PnP 3Com network card is recognized
> and is working. But it is not seeing the non PnP hardware and when the
> driver is started it don’t receives any resources.
>

Then, the question is, why your driver is started at all? Who detects &
enumerates the device?
If your driver is root enumerated or legacy, no wonder that it gets no
resources.

–pa

6

You state the driver is a Win2k driver, was it PnP? If not the driver
is worthless for XP and later, if so then the LogConfig section of the
INF you wrote for the original driver should still work fine.

Don Burn (MVP, Windows DKD)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@mail.bg [mailto:xxxxx@mail.bg]
Posted At: Friday, April 16, 2010 7:16 AM
Posted To: ntdev
Conversation: An ISA card WinXP problem
Subject: An ISA card WinXP problem

I’m facing the following problem:
An old, really old non PnP EISA ARCNET card is to run under WinXP on
an
industrial PC. The ISA bus is accessed through 2 PCI bridges - an
82801BA PCI
to PCI and an IT8888 PCI to ISA SMB. For operation the board needs
access to
I/O, on-board memory and an IRQ line. As it is “dumb”, there is no way
to tell
the bridge driver(seems to be isapnp.sys) to claim these resources on
boot
time. Is there a way to make the bridge claim these resources and
make them
available to the ISA board without digging down to the driver code
level? The
ISA has a Win2K device driver - I wrote it some 10 years ago.
Thnx in advancd - any hint will be appreciated!
Regards

__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus
signature
database 5033 (20100416) __________

The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.

http://www.eset.com

7

The Win2K driver is not PnP, it has no .inf file, regini.exe and an .ini create its HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet registry key, OSRLOADER registers/enumerates it and Service Control Manager APIs (net start/net stop) are used to start/stop it. Then you have to restart the system. I agree - ugly, but it took 10 min to make the script, .inf file to me is uglier - and I wanted to write a device driver, not an .inf.
On one of the machines (they are 5) everything works - accidentally I made the driver service start as Boot, it acquired all needed resources before the PCI, hell knows how it gets away with I/O port access and IRQ processing behind 2 PCI bridges, but it worked so I did’nt follow the issue. I made an image of the system disk, a copy of the BIOS settings and forgot the issue. This was an year ago. Now the customer wants 4 more machines installed. So 4 disks were cloned, replicated the BIOS replicated settings replicated but the miracle - as it is with miracles - did’nt happen. All 4 machines behave as they should - they hang on boot.
So far I succeeded to acquire the onboard memory of the card - even as it is behind the 2 PCI bridges - using a debugger I initialized the onboard ARCNET controller, made it receive a packet and it is as it is supposed to be. The problem is with the I/O lines and the IRQ. I’ve reserved the IRQ in the BIOS, but as the IRQ is claimed after the I/O and memory so I’m not shure this has any effect.
I started reading .inf LogConfig and DDInstall.LogConfigOverride directives with the vague idea to patch the IT8888.inf file I received from the manufacturer of the processor board and make it reserve the resources for the driver or try to write an .inf file for it. It has been a long time ago I did device drivers so I’m far from confident about what I’m doing.

8

The resource can just be decleaedr by LogConfig in the .inf file , it will be fine , and the XP will allocates the resource for you ISA card .

Somebody meet the similar probem few days ago ,you can search this forum for some imformation .