Enabling Dma

Jabba_The_Hunt

<div class="IPBDescription">My hard drive is really slow</div> Ok a few months back I got a 115 gig hard drive from maplins who kindly installed it for me, when I went back later and asked them why I hadn't really noticed any speed difference they said it was most likely because I was running 2 drives off one IDE channel and it had to run at the slowest speed.

As usual this is wrong, it took me a while to realise it but my hard drive is actually working slower than before, during an install the drive would access very fast and then stop, and then start again and then stop, seemingly every second, this is however only noticeable on the install progress bar, the hdd light is on almost constant.

A quick search on google pointed me in the direction of making sure DMA was enabled on my IDE channel for my hard drives (Primary channel), which I did and found that while it was set to "DMA if aviable" it was actually using PIO mode.

After talking to other people I have been conviced this is the problem, however I still need to know how to enable DMA mode.

I have 3 IDE Devices on Device manager - Nvidia Nforce MCP2 IDE Controller, Primary IDE Channel, Secondary IDE Channel.

System specs -

Athlon XP 2000, 1.666 GHz
768 Meg DDR ram
Nvidia Geforce 4 ti4200 128meg
ASUS A7N8X Delux Motherboard
2 hard drives on the primary channel, Im running XP off D:\ (the other is C:\) with a backup of Win ME on the C:\
2 cd drives (1 dvd, 1 cd-rw) on the secondary channel.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thansal

Bios it

I had this prob with a DVD drive (was going crazy b/c it did the same thing, thus caussing constant skipping BLECH)

so, yah get into the bios and poke around till you find the part that enables DMA/Ultra DMA <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->

Jabba_The_Hunt

Righ I poked around in the BIOS and only found one setting mentioning DMA, something like "DMA Mode" which I changed from 3 to 1 (1 was the only other option). And this hasnt changed anything, the cd drives still use DMA the hard drives don't.

Any other suggestions please?

Thansal

how bout in your bios:

Possibly something as a super heading to both the DMA and IDE controllers
I have mine set to auto detect as opposed to manual, try that?

Bo_Selecta

XP automatically turns on PIO mode after a few HDD hardware errors and cannot be switched back to DMA again. try removing the device driver and see if that works.

Thansal

possible solution?


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000X

000X "X" being the number of the controller such as 0001 for primary and 0002 for secondary. Under this location find the key "MasterIdDataCheckSum" or "SlaveIdDataCheckSum" depending on which one your drive is and delete the value for the key. this will force XP to redetect your drive after reboot. Please be careful when editing your registry.
I have gotten both of my XPs running in DMA mode using this methode and on a single layer DVD I can easily hit 10X or higher. In PIO mode I could only hit 2X. That is a big difference and since both of my XP Pros had the problem I would guess it is very common. I hope this helps some of you.
321 - Out standing job on 1.4.

stole from <a href='http://dvdxcopy.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/20775' target='_blank'>A dvd copying site <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo--></a>

CheesyPeteza

Hmm delete me.

I didn't read the first post properly.

Jabba_The_Hunt

I have tried deleting the drivers before hand, but I might give it another shot, if that doesnt work I'll try the registry thing, thanx guys.

Jabba_The_Hunt

I've tried deleting both the drives and the IDE channels in device manager, and that hasn't worked, neither has the registry hack, any other suggestions please?