when the Radeon card is not primary, bios may give info from the wrong card.

[meanwhile]

On the same PC that caused bug #1216 earlier, I'm now left with a blank screen at startup (after bootscreen showed up correctly). Can't enter safe mode by hitting space: no reaction. The blank screen looks like the background of a GDB screen to me.

Got SerialConnect readable result now (see ticket #1478, thanks), attached here.

The PC used is an IBM Aptiva 2158-265 (AMD K6-2) that runs all flavours of BeOS without problems.

[meanwhile]

SerialConnect data generated at startup

[meanwhile]

After this, I found that one partition is screwed up and the other now surprisingly also has Haiku on it (also not booting) ==> I have a partition related problem, it seems...

Will try to reinstall BeOS Max, BeOS Pro and Haiku this weekend...before it was PhOS, BeOS Max and BeOS Pro and the Haiku partition was then set up from PhOS onto the BeOS Pro partition. At an earlier stage, I successfully repartitioned a two-partition HD into this three-partition setup using a PartitionMagic CD.

(Perhaps all useless info, but that's what you get with n00bs)

[meanwhile]

Same results with a HD now divided into Haiku Max v3.0, another Haiku Max v3.0 and Haiku hrev22233 partitions. I don't know if the content of the new attachment coming out of this (HaikuSC2.txt) is also exactly the same... The partitions stayed intact this time.

[bonefish]

Doesn't look like a problem that has to do with partitions. In both cases the debug output shows that the app server crashed due to a NULL pointer read access. Maybe Stippi has an idea.

Why you can't enter the boot menu is probably another problem.

[euan]

Does the system load if the Vesa driver is selected? Looks like the radeon driver is unhappy about something, in addition to the appserver crashing while trying to draw to invalid memory?

[meanwhile]

Indeed, it now loads in Fail Safe video mode...thanks for the advice, euan ! When I try to change the settings in the 'Screen' preferences window, it says my graphics card is not supported. Maybe the attachment already shows enough info about the card, at least I saw it documented as having a Ati Rage Pro card. Can do more digging if needed...

[euan]

Indeed you have a Radeon RV100 (7000/VE), and a rage pro turbo 2X installed. You might want to disable the Rage pro turbo in the bios, or if no option, there's probably a hardware jumper on the board if it's integrated.

I checked the driver, and the rage pro's PCI ID isn't mistakenly in the radeon driver, so it shouldn't be using it. Perhaps it's a resource conflict? The Radeon driver perhaps could have loaded the wrong bios info?

[meanwhile]

Heh, now it gets complicated: there are two video cards on this PC: one that's integrated on the motherboard (the Rage pro turbo 2x) and another seperate one that was bought later on. In fact, when changing the BIOS settings to use the latter, Haiku allows a good choice in Screen settings (just found out). Maybe this -the two cards- causes a resource conflict?

Also, I wonder if the Haiku install went allright, because a few major things don't work anymore that used to do so in earlier revisions: Search function doesn't work here and Screensaver doesn't keep it's settings...maybe there are some more things left out that are (partly) causing the problem.

Perhaps best would be to install Haiku again and (to avoid confusion) do it with a newer revision when it comes out.

[meanwhile]

BTW, the BIOS setting are [own translation]: Primary Video Adapter:

• Auto
• On Systemboard

It lets you choose only between one of the two.

[meanwhile]

Update:

Installed hrev22235 and this time did it right: it's fully functional again.

However, the blank screen is still there after selecting 'on systemboard' in the BIOS, with the same behaviour in fail safe video mode.

[euan]

Solution: Don't do that then! ;)

[euan]

I guess it's down to the Radeon driver attempting to use the bios from the Rage Pro... Back in the days there was an extra check in the bios code to ensure the bios contained Radeon, R100, RV100, R200, RV250, RV280, R300, R350, R400, etc. I removed it because it was too inconsistent, and caused many probs. Perhaps it should be added back in.

[meanwhile]

:)

Yeah, I'm happy with the way Haiku deals with the added video card, but one of the two other partitions (BeOS Max v3.0) doesn't display such a stable image like Haiku does.

This morning BeOS Max v4b1 was put on the third partition and it evidently uses the Haiku driver (same good quality), but since one can still argue there's a bug remaining I hope some solution can someday be found (if possible)....fortunately it's a much less urgent bug now -in this case.

[euan]

Just to summarise, this bug is that when the Radeon card is not primary, the card attempts to read the bios, and may read bios info from the wrong card. Should differentiate between ATI and other brands, but not between ATI families.

[scottmc]

Perhaps the subject of this ticket can be revised to reflect the real issue, as the current subject doesn't explain anything.

[euan]

Closing these tickets due to the passing of time. Please consider opening new tickets with current syslogs if still using these graphics accelerators and seeing these issues.

[pulkomandy]

Move tickets closed as invalid/obsolete out of R1.1 milestone.