Beware the BIOS APIC Setting

[Vaughn Treude]

Hello all:
Some of you may have noticed that I've done a lot of postings about problems 
with a system which I'd upgraded with a high-end Soyo motherboard.  These 
problems included:
1. Installing the SCSI driver would hang the system, whether during install 
or manual loading of the module.
2. No version of Mandrake I could get to install would communicate to any 
other machine via any NIC.
3. Red Hat 8 and 9 both had a nasty habit of freezing when the screen saver 
was on.  The logs would show a series of "Dazed and confused" messages.

I thought I'd let you know that I solved at least the first two problems 
(haven't checked #3 yet), more or less by accident.  I was checking the 
system BIOS, and, at a whim, I disabled APIC support (I wasn't even sure what 
that was at the time.  I know now that it's an extended version of PCI 
interrupt support, but I wonder why it was hosing the system so badly.)
I then reinstalled Mandrake 9.1, and everything worked!  I'm ecstatic, but 
what an incredible pain it was finding the cause.  I now think I was unjustly 
accusing my old Initio SCSI board - I bought a new AP10 card, which kudzu at 
first didn't see until I realized I had to run the board's configuration 
utility.  At this point, the AP-10 ALSO hung the Mandrake install - at least 
until I changed the APIC setting.  I suppose I could return the new SCSI card 
to Fry's and get my $50 back but, NFW.  It works and I'm not opening that 
case up again unless I hear chipmunks running around in there.

Anyway, I thought I'd let you all know in case some hapless soul out there 
encounters the same problem I did.

Vaughn