PACE modem help needed

[felix]

I have a PACE 56 voice internal modem (firmware upgraded to V90) which was working nicely in an old PC. My problem is that I can't get my new(er) PC (HP Vectra VE5 series 4) to recognize it at all. It's ISA plug and play - for which read plug and pray - but neither the BIOS nor Windows can find it.

I put it back in an old PC to confirm that I hadn't fried its chips and it showed up OK. A DOS utility called COMINFO showed that it was using COM3 and IRQ5. Another DOS utility called PACECARD allowed me to change this but the PC's BIOS persisted in resetting it to COM3 and IRQ5 until I disabled COM2. At this point the modem came up as COM2 and IRQ3 as expected.

I put it back into the Vectra which has no COM2. Nothing! I reserved IRQ3 for ISA use. Still nothing. I reserved ALL the unused IRQs (including IRQ5) for ISA use. Still nothing. I gave up.

Does anybody have any experience of this modem? Is there some way of getting it out of PnP mode and giving it a fixed port address, IRQ etc? There's nothing about this in the manual and no switches on the board but there is a little clump of solder pads with labels such as IRQ5, IRQ9, etc.

All replies (other than "get yourself a proper PC") will be gratefully received.

 

[breezer]

i would get a new modem, just found this one ok so its an internal modem, but at this price cant be that bad can it?

 

[2scoops0406]

ISA is not really PnP anyway, so there is a good chance that you'll have to configure manually.

 

[Igorian]

If your new(er) PC has a spare PCI slot, I would opt for a new modem for about a tenner (or less). You will have to check compatibility as I assume you have an older o/s.

 

[felix]

Thanks lads. I'm coming round to the idea that my new(ish) BIOS, which is biased in favour of PCI, simply doesn't know - or care - how to deal with this particular modem. It's either not bothering to assign any resources to the thing or else it can't deal with something that looks like a COM port on the ISA bus. (The PACE 56 is a hardware modem.)

I've got an external modem which works well enough (though it uses up my only serial port) and a Motorola software modem that I've yet to try out. This has become a "What the hell's going on?" puzzle rather than a practical problem. If I ever get to the bottom of it I'll pass it on to the world and his dog - and his modem!

 

[Igorian]

What o/s are you trying to get it working with felix?

 

[felix]

Hi Igorian

I've tried Win 98 and Win 2000 with no success. Somebody lent me a bootable CD with what he claimed was Linux on it. That didn't work either. I had some hopes for 2000 because years ago I was told that it ignored the BIOS and went looking for hardware itself. Whether this is true or not it didn't find my modem!

The most telling bit of information is a BIOS information screen that comes up if I press Esc during the POST. Along with lots of stuff about CPU, memory, disks, etc this shows three ISA PnP slots (which is correct) but they're all empty! The cards plugged into the PCI slots are identified correctly (more or less) but that modem might as well not exist!

 

[Igorian]

I'm wondering if your old PC had any PCI slots. Windows supports PCI bus steering to dynamically allocate resources, however, it may be preventing the ISA card from getting it's share. On certain boards some ISA and PCI slots were mutually exclusive for this reason. You could try removing all the PCI cards to test this (except the graphic adaptor, if PCI).

Are the expansion slots part of the main board or are they an extension of a VESA slot and contained on a daughter board? I seem to remember these as problematic because of the strange master/slave arrangement required to supply resources.

 

[felix]

Both the old PCs in which the modem worked had a mixture of ISA and PCI slots. One of them was an old Vectra 486. The mechanical construction of the two Vectras is very similar with all slots on a daughter board. The BIOSes are very different.

The old 486 BIOS listed four specific IRQs that could be assigned to either PCI or ISA use. I made them all ISA. The newer Vectra lists most of the IRQs from 3 upwards and allows them to be "reserved for ISA use" even though reserving some of them causes a conflict with built in hardware! I tried reserving all those that were allowed, including 3 and 5 but it didn't work. What I think it means is "reserved for non-PnP ISA". I can get other ISA cards to work but they are all non-PnP.

I have just unearthed some diagnostic software that I downloaded from HP's website a few years ago - when they still acknowledged the existence of my old VE5. I think it's time I gave it a spin but I won't be holding my breath. If nothing else I'll know an awful lot more about PCs than I did a few weeks ago.