I/O Card Parity Error

I/O Card Parity Error

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Explanation: An expansion card has generated an error indicating a failure, or at the least, a malfunction. Generally this means a problem with the card itself, and not necessarily a problem with the overall system. This is typically manifested through an error message, such as a ROM checksum error or I/O parity error, however on some later systems such as those with the TX and HX Intel chipsets and where Windows 9x has been installed, you may only see an error appear in Device Manager.

Diagnosis: I/O Card Parity Errors are extremely rare today as compared to a few years ago when most cards installed in a system were I/O cards. Today, most features that would have been part of an I/O card are built into the motherboard. In an event, most of the problems with specific expansion cards depend entirely on the nature of the card and how they effect the system. The following will help you work your way through the problem.

Recommendation:

• Make sure all the cards are securely inserted into the system. Very long cards, especially those that use the very old VESA local bus, can sometimes come partially loose because of their length, causing strange results.
• Make sure that there are no physical problems with the motherboard or internal connections. Verify that the sockets for the cards are clean and free of dirt and dust and be particularly observant of corrosion in high humidity areas.
• Make sure that the connections, jumpers and any software drivers associated with this card are correct.
• If this card has its own BIOS ROM, make sure that the shadowing of that segment of ROM address space is not enabled in the Motherboards BIOS, as this can cause problems. While shadowing will work with many cards, it won’t work with all of them.
• If you have done all the above and the problem persists, begin removing one card at a time (not the video card) and see if that effects the problem. If it does, then either the other card was causing the difficulty, or there is some sort of a resource conflict.
• Try the card in a different slot and see if it works. This is especially true of PCI cards, which will try to use different IRQ lines depending on which slot they are placed into. By changing the slot you may eliminate a resource conflict that was actually causing the problem.

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