ANA-6944A/TX (!) + AMIBIOS + linux-2.1.122; 3/4 success!

[Mark Whitis]

Since you have problems getting it to work under Windows 98 with
the manufacturers drivers and diagnositcs and since you have
problems with other boards in that slot it seems likely you have a
hardware problem and your difficulties have nothing to do with the 
tulip driver.

You should probably replace your computer or motherboard.  You may
have a defective PCI slot.  I do recall having some problems
with the quartet cards when I tried to use them in one particular
machine - I ended up concluding that the PCI bus was defective
on that machine.

You may also simply have a resource conflict between ISA and PCI 
peripherals.  When you reverse the probe order, that could easily
cause a change between eth0 and eth3 since those will be assigned
resources in the opposite order.  When you change the order of
the boards, that also changes the order in which resources are
assigned to them and can change which board has a conflict.

But it sounds as if you have a defective or substandard pci slot
in your machine.  A single pin which miscontacts on the edge
connector or a bad solder joint could be the cause of your problem.
Or someone could have cut corners and made one of the slots
non bus mastering (or virtually worthless).

When you are trying to use advanced expansion boards, it really does
pay to use a decent motherboard.  ATX form factor is also helpful
for mechanical reasons - there is less likely to be any connectors,
processors, or memory in the way of long expansion cards.  And 
a decent bios not only doesn't have the reverse probe order problem
but gives you more flexibility in mapping device resources.

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