New video card, X server will not start; irqbalance shutdown fails

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 13:43 -0500, Gregory E. Garland wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> My previous video card (ATI Radeon 9800 AGP) decided to bite the dust, so I
> replaced it with a new ATI Radeon X700 Pro AGP card. Naturally, this card
> does not appear in the list for the display configuration tool, and trying
> to use any of the other Radeon types that are gives an error of "No Matching
> Device Section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:1) found"; "No devices detected"
> and the X server does not start. I can start server using the generic VESA
> type, and there does appear to be a relevant article (Article ID: 5642) in
> the Red Hat Knowledgebase about installing ATI Drivers on a 64-bit machine
> (The PC has an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, and is running Red Hat ES 4). However,
> before I install these 32-bit packages and see if that solves the problem I
> have noticed that when the machine shuts down there now appears an error
> message saying that irqbalance failed to shut down. So I'm wondering if
> there is something else going on that causes the system to fail to detect
> the new video card.

Have you "up2date"d your machine recently?  There may be an updated
driver set for your card.

Should you wish to install the ATI proprietary drivers, first you must
see if you're running the 32-bit version of RHEL or the 64-bit version.
A simple "uname -a" will tell you.  You must then install the FireGL
version appropriate to your hardware BEFORE you install the driver.

As far as the irqbalance not shutting down, that's a minor thing and I
wouldn't worry about it.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-      On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd say...  oh, somewhere in there.     -
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