PCI System Error NW5.1

[M.Gehasse]

Every once in a while our Netserver running NetWare 5.1 SP3 gives a PCI System Error on Bus/Device?Fucntion 0078h. I read in another topic a few weeks ago this is an SP3 problem which can only be solved by downgrading to SP2. Does anybody know another solution ? I don't want to downgrade one of our servers. Does an update to SP4 fix anything ?

[Adam_34]

The system is receiving a PCI device error on device funtion 0078h during POST.

Possible causes could be:
broken DIMM
defective RAID controller
BIOS

check :

Check the HW eventlog for single or multiple biT DIMM errors. Replace DIMM when appropriate

Flash the BIOS to the latest version and clear the CMOS. This should clear any corruption.

Flash the RAID controller Firmware.

Swap the DIMM of the RAID controller. This has turned out the cause of the issue as well.

[Greg Carlson]

M. Gehasse,

It is definately not a hardware issue which is not resolved by replacing parts.. I don't know of anyone at SP4 running 5.1 currently so I would be curious to see if there is a change between SP 3 and 4.. Hopefully whatever NW changed between SP2 and SP3 is resolved w/ SP4. This is happening only on the LC2000 that I'm aware of currently. Please post an update if you try SP4..

Thanks,
Greg

[M.Gehasse]

Update: I have assigned irq's to the pci slots in use and disabled the remaining slots in the BIOS. I also disabled all unused devices like serial and printer ports. This seems to help since the server did not crash today. If it does again, I will upgrade to SP4 and let you know what happened. Thanks for the response.

[Terri Harris]

Other hardware manufacturers are also reporting this error when running Netware 5.1 with either SP2 or SP3.
The error does not occur with SP1
Does SP4 solve the problem? Unknown at this time.

[M.Gehasse]

Installed SP4 two days ago and haven't had any problems since. We also had some abends on our other LC2000's and those are gone after SP4 as well. Thanks for the suggestions.

[Tony Aex]

We are also getting this exact error. We started getting this error running NW 5.0 sp6a.

We have since upgraded to NW 5.1 and are currently running sp4. We had this error crash our server this morning.

Anybody else have this problem running sp4?

[M.Gehasse]

It seemed SP4 solved our problem, but it was only temporarily. We still have the PCI system error. HP service desk did not find an answer and Novell isn't helpfull as well. We are thinking about changing hardware now.

[Greg Carlson]

M. Gehasse,

Go back to SP1. NW changed something and they don't know what they did.

Ciao,
Greg

[Tony Aex]

Well, We applied sp5 last night. The server crashed in the wee hours of the morning. We've checked and double checked all drivers. We'd like to backrev the sp's to SP 1 or 2 but we can't find them on NW's site. We don't have them because the first sp we started with was 3.

I'm fast approaching my drastic resolution of moving this server onto a different hardware base. I'd really rather not go through all this but nothing seems to work.

[Ed Martens]

We hav 35 LC2000U3 with Nw5.1 SP4 and have none problems.
The Thing we do is make sure your hardware setting are oke. Don't use irq9 and 15. We give PCI slots dedicated irq's
Our config.
- Netraid irq10 slot 5
- TTRCC irq3 slot 1(disabled serial2)
- HPTX nic irq5 slot 4
- Onboard SCSI contrl irq11
- Embedded LAN irq 5
All the remaining slots disabled.

Good luke and please let me know if it solved any problems.