Hi all,

I'm getting a bit desperate about the following problem, hopefully
someone could point me into the right direction:

I'm not a computer hardware expert, but I usually am capable enough to
build my own PC with the components I prefer. Friday last week I
bought new components for my PC. My system is dual bootable
(win2000/mandrake 9.2). In my new setup linux seems to give problems
with my HDD. It freezes with partitioning/formatting. The particular
HDD gives no problems with my old PC. While starting up the computer,
I noticed my extra Promise UDMA133 controller usues the same IRQ
(IRQ11) as the USB controller *and* display controller. IMO this seems
like conflicting hardware. However, I installed win2k at another 80GB
Maxtor HDD with the very same Promise controller without any problems.
I tried to reserve IRQ11 in the BIOS, but when I do this the PC
assigns all above mentioned devices to IRQ5. I tried the Promise card
in another PCI slot without results.

As I said before, in my old PC this HDD performs well, linux installs
just fine. However, when I do this and move the HDD to my new PC, it
will boot linux eventually, but it will crash at a moment for certain.

I removed the Promise UDMA133 controller and used only the onboard
UDMA133 controller. Partitioned and formatted the linux HDD and now
linux would even install correctly, but after some time it will freeze
and ruin the user account permanently.

My old system: 230W noname PSU / Asus P2B-F (BX) / 1GHz Celeron
(Cu-mine) / 512MB PC100 / 3x Maxtor 80GB / GeForce2 / Promise UDMA133
/ onboard DMA33 / DVD-ROM / DVD-RW / FDD. DVD players at the onboard
controller, 2x win HDD at Promise IDE1, 1x linux HDD at Promise IDE2.

New system: 350W Aopen PSU / Asus A7N8X-X (nForce2) / Athlon 2500 /
512MB PC3200 / 3x Maxtor 80GB / GeForce2 / Promise UDMA133 / onboard
UDMA133 / DVD-ROM / DVD-RW / FDD.

I'm a bit lost now. I flashed the BIOS to 1007 and disabeled APIC in the BIOS,
no improvement at all. I was thinking that linux gives problems for some
reason with the nForce 2 chipset, since win2k installs and runs
without any problems. Could this be? Has anyone compareble
experiences? If so, how were these problems solved? Is it a Mandrake
specific problem? For the time being I didn't try another distro,
although both Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 gave the same errors :-( All
feedback is highly appreciated!

Regards,
Chris