Forcing REMM.SYS to not probe for cards, instead specifying I/O addresses?

[bhtooefr]

Got an interesting issue, where REMM.SYS 4.70 is wiping out my SMC 8003WC ethernet card's RAM base address (moving it from CE00h to 8000h - yeah, nasty) - apparently its probing for AST EEMS cards is not actually compatible with the SMC 8003WC's EZSetup protocol.

None of the docs I've found say how to manually specify I/O addresses in REMM.SYS, though.

Am I going to have to figure out how it's probing, and manually patch out the probing?

Edit: Also, verified that it's only causing problems on a cold start. If I bring the machine up with REMM.SYS commented out, then uncomment it and reboot, it treats it as a warm boot and doesn't do a full memory test. That memory test seems to be when it's damaging the ethernet card's config. If it helps, the card is a SixPak Premium with 1024 KiB installed. And, I've tried moving the I/O address from 0218 to 0258, no change in symptoms.

Ethernet card is configured for 280h to 29Fh, IRQ 2, RAM base CE00h, and I really don't want to use the jumpered configs (the only one I even could use is 280h I/O base, IRQ 3 (conflicts with COM2: if I ever get that installed), RAM base D000h (very much not optimal)).

 

[bear]

I doubt it has anything to do with the IO address. You need to specify an excluded memory range to prevent REMM.SYS from locating one or more of the EMS page frames at the same address(es) as the NIC is using for its RAM window.

 

[bhtooefr]

Good call - seems the NIC was moving out of the way of REMM.SYS (or maybe the packet driver was moving it). Forced it to put the EMS 3.2 page frame at D000h and excluded CE00h-CFFFh (as well as B800h-BBFFh and C800h-C9FFh), and seems to be happy. Thanks for the hint.