Mobo has no DMA settings in bios

[Faustus]

Got a computer here that is stuck in PIO mode even after a format and reinstall. Funny thing is even though the board says it supports DMA mode (duh!) there is no setting in the bios to turn it on.

Anyone seen this before?

[redwudz]

What's the MB? There are a few out there that have 'hidden' settings to get to the rest of the BIOS. Though, I've never ran into one without some way to set the DMA mode. Unless it's something like a Compaq or a proprietary MB that they don't want you to mess with that uses custom OS discs to set everything?

[Cobra]

I really don't know if this will help, since you've reformatted but it did work for me. Go to the device manager and uninstall the IDE channel that the offending device is on. Restart and it should revert back to DMA.

Maybe it is a damaged cable, or maybe the device is on the way out.

[Faustus]

Na cobra, thats the first thing I tried. Also eventually I found the "Advanced BIOS" area but there isn't much in there either other then double checking that DMA is on "Auto" which it already was.

We did a ton of stuff to try and fix it. Even switched to Windows XP, eventually the fix was to replace the drive. That controller and drive just didn't get along. The moment something else was tried it worked fine. The misbehaving drive worked fine in mine so... ehhh.