Hard drives stuck in PIO Mode

R

rusek

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 30, 2004
Messages
282
Hello,

Recently my hard drives decided to go into PIO mode and I cannot get them to go back to DMA. I have tried everything on the internet that I can find to try, and none of it has worked.

I have:
In Device Manager switched to PIO mode, then switched back to DMA
In Device Manager uninstalled the hard drives and the IDE controllers
Updated chipset drivers
Switched IDE Cables
Completely reinstalled Windows XP(w/SP2)
(Did a quick format, don't know if this affected it)
Gone into the BIOS and changed every setting relating to the hard drives
Gone into registry and added/deleted certains keys that have to do with IDE controllers
Used the UBCD to run diagnostics on the HD's and they showed no errors.

My system is:
P4 2.8C
MSI Neo2-P 865 Motherboard
4x 512mb Corsair DDR400
80gb Hitachi Deskstar (Master)(NTFS)
120gb Seagate (Slave)(NTFS)
Pioneer DVD Burner(Master)
Lite-On DVD-ROM(Slave)
eVGA 6800(AGP)
Fortron Blue Storm 350w PSU w/Dual 12v rails

Idle temps for CPU is 36, 42 under load
HD's have an 80mm Intake Fan blowing over them


Any help is appreciated.
 
Forgot to mention that the BIOS recognizes both drives as UDMA 5
 
only thing that i can think of, maybe updating, or installing chipset or IDE drivers again.
 
I've tried reinstalling the latest IDE drivers and the chipset drivers. No go. Any more ideas?
 
system restore, sux but worth a shot, depending on what you have done up until now.(worth losing any other software u have installed up to now?)
 
I completely reformated and reinstalled XP. I'm thinking it's a messed up IDE controller. I'll have a PCI IDE card to test in a day or two.
 
Do you have Rounded IDE cables? Sometimes those can cause electrical interferance greater than what the drive/bus/OS can tolerate, hence the dropback. Overly long (over 18") cables can cause data corruption too. WinXP downgrades to PIO after repeated data errors in UDMA, had that problem once. Reset the error couters, but lost the file and don't know where I got the UDMA thing. Try your PCI controller, see if that helps.
 
No rounded cables here, I've actually tried 3 different cables, all your standard flat IDE cables. I also tried reseting the counters thing with a string added to the registry, didn't do anything.
 
Its funny that I come accross this today, as I wasted a good portion of today with the same problem.

My box (in sig) died (damn cheap mobo damnit) so I'm runnin my server, which has very similar specs to your system. 2.8/533/512, MSI Neo-2 865PE. 1 DVD-RW and dual 40GB HDDs, all IDE.

So I want to access files from my SATA HDD from my main box - so I hook it up. It was running very slow, and I see that the CPU Kernel usage is sky high. PIO mode on the SATA drive.

So I reboot and put the controller into native mode (from legacy). Windows crashed on the load. When I swapped it back to native, windows still crashed on me.

Long story short (and three windows re-installs later) I ended up putting the bios back to legacy mode, P-ATA only, with SATA keep-alive (Same as it was this morning). Now all the drives are UDMA. Go figure.
 
I've played with legacy and native modes before, but I will try this combination. What a coincidence.
 
Well I tried the suggested settings in the BIOS and it didn't help.

Anyone else have any ideas?
 
Thanks for the lhelp, but I've already tried everything on that page.

Can't figure this problem out at all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top