Installing Win2K w/o ACPI

[moreau]

Hello all.

Am helping a friend with a Video related Problem. They are attempting to do DV editing under Win2K, and are at a point where they feel that ACPI is causing them trouble. In fact, with their hardware config, Pinnacle support and Canopus support both indicated that they should install Win2K without ACPI. So, the short question is listed below, followed by a more detailed summary of the problem, in case you folks can think of other issues.

Q: How can one do a clean install of Win2K with ACPI disabled. The result should be that under device manager the computer shows up as "MPS multi-processor" system.

Symptoms. They started with a DVRaptor from Canopus. They are using Win2K and Premiere 6. They reinstalled clean a number of times, as per the Canopus provided instructions. Basically the forums and Tech support claim that ACPI is "the devil" to the Raptor. So, they tried a Pinnacle DV200 card, because a Pinnacle Support Rep claimed it would work . It didn't, so they called again to Pinnacle, and another rep, who has worked with both cards, said "disable ACPI". So, see question above.

Here are the system specs:
Asus P2B-DS, bios 1012A, Rev 1.06
Dual PIII 550, 512K cache
Win2K SP2
ATI Radeon VE
SBLive Value
1x9GB Seagate 18XL, 2x18GB Seagate 18XL, 2x 18GB IBM 36LZX
Onboard Adapted U2W controller

So, this is definitely a video related problem, though my primary question is about doing the ACPIless install. Once I get that, I'm going to sit down with them and tech support and figure out how do get one of these cards working properly.

Thanks all in advance,
Charles

[Karlson]

When installing W2k, it will ask you to press F6 to load other drivers. When this message appears, press F5 (yes, 5) and select Standard-PC.

You will eventually be able to reconfigure by selecting the ACPI-PC in the Hardware Manager and change th ACPI-PC to Standard-PC. This worked for me.

[Chuckwagon]

There is another, more involved method for installing Win2k without ACPI support. If you are an untrusting sort, and often I don't trust MS products to do what I want, and you want to be absolutely sure Win2k didn't install what you just told it not to install by hitting F5, you can do the following:

In the I386 directory of the Win2k install files you can find the file Txtsetup.sif. Edit this file and search for EnableACPI - it is a little section that determines if ACPI support will be installed. Change the setting to 0. It's explained right there so it isn't hard to understand. Then install with the edited Txtsetup.sif. I actually created a CD with the changed file on it, but you can copy the install files to the hard disk and edit the file from there if you like. Copying the whole Win2k Pro cd takes almost 400MB though, so you might not want to go that route.

Incidently, without ACPI installed your hardware resources will not all share INT 9 like they normally do under Win2k. So in my system I reset my config from the motherboard BIOS to help insure that as many items as possible were on their own INTs. Technically, according to the PCI spec, it shouldn't matter, but I've had too many instances where it did matter to trust that sharing works all the time, so I try for one INT for each device if I can manage it.

Good luck.

[wkulecz]

I'd lose the SB Live value and try a different sound card before going thru the trouble of reinstalling W2K and everything without ACPI enabled.

I've running an ASUS P2B-D PIII-500 (no on board SCSI, but a PCI Adaptec 2940 for CD-R, CDROM, scanner, and Jaz drive) with ACPI enabled and happily running MSP6, Premiere6, Photoshop6 and a bunch of other crap. Its not my main editing machine but I do lots of short jobs on it and it my main photoshop workstation.
I've an ISA SB16.

Next I'd lose the Radon -- I've had no trouble with G200, G450, TNT2 or Voodoo3 cards all of which have been in my box at one time or another -- currently a PCI Voodoo3 2000 as Primary and a G200 AGP as secondary (weird, but I like photoshop on the 1600x1200 21" monitor as secondary while the primary is a 17" running 1152x864). I want PS on the secondary because live video in a window via an overlay driver only works on the primary monitor and this way it doesn't step on PS.

--wally.