PVR500 and XP - freezing on reboot

[Joe Bloggins]

Good morning,

I have a very strange behavior that I need your assistance with. I have a PVR-500 that works fine once Windows (XP Pro SP2) is booted but Windows sporadically freezes on reboot (1 freeze every 3 or 4 reboots). Windows freeze at the “Windows XP” logo while the blue dots are moving (ie while loading drivers). I know the issue is with the PVR card because I tried booting without it and I had 20 successful reboots. Safe mode always works fine. If the onboard GigE Ethernet card is enabled, then I can’t reboot at all.

I have made an hypothesis but I need your help to confirm it. Since the PVR 500 is really two PVR 150s, I wonder if the successful bootups happen when the driver for PVR150#1 loads first then the driver for the second PVR150 loads. Could it be possible that Windows freezes if PVR#2 loads first?

As a side note, I had bought a HVR 1600 card as well to act as a third tuner and Windows completely stopped booting with that card inside so I returned it.

As a different side note, I am running VmWare Server on this machine but the PVR runs natively to Windows. Could that be an issue?

I have a dedicated server with the hardware below:

Motherboard: Tyan i7501 (S2721UGN-533) with the following on-board devices:
- ATI® RAGE™ XL PCI
- Intel® 82551QM Fast Ethernet controller
- Adaptec AIC-7902W controller (Disabled)
- Intel® 82546EB dual-channel Gigabit Ethernet controller (Disabled)
- Dual Xeon 2.66GHz

http://www.tyan.com/product_board_spec.aspx?pid=55

Drives: Main drive: Seagate 120GB
Second drive: WD 500GB
USB drive: External 120GB (currently turned off and still happening)
DVD burner: LG GSA-4160B

Other: IOGear PCI to USB (model GIC 220U) (this card was added later (after the problem was happening))
Hauppauge PVR-500
APC USB UPS

Any assistance you can provide will be greatly appreciated as I have spent over 50 hours troubleshooting this issue.

Thanks,

Martin

[Joe Bloggins]

Hi all,

I found the problem after a lot of troubleshooting. My motherboard has 5 slots. 1 x PCI and 4 PCI-X (do not confuse with PCI Express). Once I put the PVR 500 into the PCI slot, the problems went away. So even though the PCI-X are supposed to be backwards compatible, you better run your own tests.

Martin