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DMA Issues

K

Koz

Gawd
Joined
May 25, 2003
Messages
658
I used to have a Maxtor 60GB drive as master on my primary channel, with a Zip Drive as the slave. My secondary channel was my CDRW drive as primary, DVD drive as slave. I bought a 160GB WD drive to add aditional storage, and disconnected the Zip Drive as I rarely use it and I dont have enough IDE channels. Now in device manager one device on each channel is in PIO mode. They're both set to DMA if avaliable and I've set the to PIO then reset to DMA to try to fix it. I really need to get them to run in DMA mode as the performance hit for PIO is huge.
 
have you tried to uninstall the IDE controller driver and reboot?
 
^ typically the solution

DMA Mode for ATA/ATAPI Devices in Windows XP


The Microsoft Windows XP operating system enables DMA by default on most of the ATA or ATAPI (IDE) devices. To ensure system stability, however, PIO mode will be selected for DMA-capable devices under some circumstances. This article explains the reasons for an ATA or ATAPI device to be in PIO mode on systems running Windows XP.



PIO mode is enabled by default in the following situations:

• For ATAPI devices, except DVD and CD-R/RWW drives. Windows XP enables PIO by default on ATAPI tape drives, CD-ROM drives, and ATAPI removable drives such as magneto-optical (MO) drives. The user can, however, enable DMA on an ATAPI device through Device Manager, as described at the end of this article.


Windows XP enables DMA by default on ATAPI DVD and CD-RW/CD-R drives.


• For ATA or ATAPI devices that do not work properly in DMA mode. Compatibility testing at Microsoft has shown that enabling DMA on certain drives could cause data corruption or reduced system stability. There is no way for the user to enable DMA on these devices.

• For certain IDE chipsets that cause data corruption. For ATA or ATAPI devices using chipsets that are known to cause problems running in the DMA mode, Windows will enable PIO by default.


System manufacturers can override this default behavior by implementing the _GTM and _STM methods in the ACPI BIOS. Also, the user can enable DMA using the Device Manager.


• For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.


In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.

Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).

If the mini-IDE driver for the device does not support stepping down transfer modes, or if the device is running UDMA mode 0, Windows XP will step down to PIO mode after encountering six or more CRC errors. In this case, a system reboot should restore the original DMA mode settings.

All CRC and timeout errors are logged in the system event log. These types of errors could be caused by improper mounting or improper cabling (for example, 40-pin instead of 80-pin cable). Or such errors could indicate imminent hardware failure, for example, in a hard drive or chipset.
Click to expand...

In addition, for an interesting tidbit, regarding some mythology relating to this
 
Hmm... Everything is working in DMA mode now. They're all running in DMA Mode 2 though... Both harddrives and both CD Drives... My computer is a Dell P3 1GHz, you think its too old to support higher DMAs?
 
mode 2 would be the maximum for the opticals
but the HDD should probably be Mode 5
are you using an 80 wire ATA cable?
It would have 40 pins like the ones that came with the opticals, but twice the nimber of wires,
they are all "ground" wires, to reduce crosstalk and allow the higher speed
 
hah i remembered switching the cable to a new 80Wire, but now that I look at it, its definitely 40, well I'll be switching that out tomorrow and everything should be fixed.
 
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