[Off Topic] Intel PR440FX motherboard question - ISA card and 2nd IDE interface

[Shahid Sheikh <sheikh erols com>]

Sorry for the OT. Maybe someone can point me in the right direction for 
this problem.

After I got 6.0 all working and everything (didn't have any version of 
linux installed on this box previously), it started freezing up the system 
intermittently till a point now if I just open the CD player and move my 
cursor over the CD player window it would completely freeze the system. 
Cant even toggle num-lock from that point. It doesn't freeze in text mode. 
Only when I'm in X is when it halts.

The board is a Intel PR440FX with dual procs and onboard eepro100, Crystal 
sound and AIC 7880 SCSI. All HDs are IDE and there are two SCSI CDs and a 
SCSI CD-R. In addition to this I have a Diamon Stealth (I forget which one) 
with a S3 Virge chipset and a ISA Databook PCMCIA controller.

Now looking around in 98 installed on the same machine, I got the hint that 
maybe the Databook IRQ (10) is conflicting with the S3 card. So I figured I 
can change my BIOS' PnP settings (PnP is configured to set by BIOS instead 
of a PnP OS) to set aside an IRQ for the ISA card. But as soon as I set 
aside an IRQ for the ISA card, the system automatically disables the second 
IDE interface. Once that interface is disabled, I cannot re-enable it 
unless I crear the CMOS.

So where am I loosing my IRQ?

0: 	timer
1:	keyboard
2:	cascade (RTC???)
3:	com2
4:	com1
5:	sound
6:	floppy
7:	lpt1
8:	RTC
9:	mpu401
10:	< unused >
11:	Databook PCMCIA (ISA)
12:	PS/2
13:	fpu
14:	ide1
15:	ide2
17:	AIC7880
18:	EEPro100

The S3 Virge card doesn't show up in /proc/interrupts. So assuming that S3 
will be using 9, 10, or 11 I have tried shuffling the mpu and the ISA card 
around with no avail.

The other thing I noticed is as soon as I start moving stuff around and try 
to resolve what I think is an IRQ conflict, the Databook PCMCIA controller 
stops working under 98. To get it back up, I have to remove the devices, 
clear the CMOS and let PnP in 98 try to find the devices again.

Any Ideas? turning off the com and lpt ports is not an option as I was 
hoping to use all of them. Does USB use an IRQ? I've tried it both with USB 
enabled and disabled.

Shahid