Enabling DMA in Windows XP

[EBK]

I have a new Maxtor 60gb Diamondmax hard drive, but I can't enable DMA on it. My other drive is on the same channel, but it is Ultra DMA Mode 4. There is nothing in my BIOS having to do with DMA either. In device manager I select "DMA if available," but it says the current transfer mode is PIO. I have a Gigabyte GA-7ZX (Rev 5.1). It has the most recent BIOS and the most recent VIA 4in1 drivers. Does anybody out there have any idea on how to enable DMA on my system?

[EBK]

Anybody?

[sommersby]

Is the maxtor you are trying to enable your boot drive or the slave drive, if it is your boot drive then it becomes allot more complicated to fix, if it is the slave drive you can try three things, first, make sure you are using an 80 wire udma cable not the older 40 wire, second, try selecting pio only reboot, then select dam if available and reboot, if that doesn't work then go to device manager, select the drive in pio mode and uninstall it, then do a full restart and let windows redetect the drive, if that still doesn't work then there is another option but it is a bit complicated but guarenteed to fix it as long as it isn't an actual hardware problem, one other option is to download the latest chipset drivers if you are using a via chipset, the 4 in 1 driver is available from their site and fixes allot of problems with xp, but like I said at the beginning, if it is your boot drive then it can be fixed but requires a little more work...Gary

[sommersby]

PS, once you get it fixed, immeadiatly create a restore point, I have a problem along the same lines, xp downgrades my dvdrom to pio mode every now and then but it is a quick fix to restor to the day before.

[Mirror_Image]

http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/storage/IDE-DMA.asp

[sommersby]

http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/storage/IDE-DMA.asp

unfortunatly this method does not work if the problem drive is your boot drive as I stated, the other info provided is as I stated....lol

And I had to learn the hard way....*S*

[tigerwolf]

I do have two things.

1. You have the drives as master and slave and not on a cable select system correct? If you are using cable select, put the jumpers to master and slave on the drives.

2. If you don't have UDMA IDE CABLES, Then Go buy a couple. Best Buy Carries A Belkin UDMA Cable For About $18. Which Supports Ultra ATA/UltraDMA 66 or 100. Belkin Part Number: F2N1107-18INCH
Or check around online for pricing on udma ide cables.

The other problem you could be running into is how you have your drives setup. What device do you have on the line with the hard drive? If its a cd-rom/dvd-rom, etc, get it off that line.

[tigerwolf]

why buy UDMA cables? you may ask, well at least someone here will.

well because with the data transfer rate being increased along the line, the older cabling can cause for lack of better terminology here, bottle necking and thereby causing errors and slow downs, which there by causes XP to resort to compatibility mode aka PIO mode. Many people run out and grab new drives and don't even think about the cabling that's being ran to it, if it plugs up it must work. Well sure it will work, but how well will it work. If you take an ide cable from an old 386 or 486 and hook it up to a drive that does 133mb/sec and a controller that supports the same, guess what that cable is going to ******* flip out.

If your drive setup is correct, I'll say that XP is getting errors and timeouts with the transmission time to the drives and thereby resorting to pio mode. Spend the cash and get the UDMA cables and the timeouts will quit and xp will be happy. Though after getting the cables you will have to remove the profiles of the drives and etc so that windows can re-detect the hardware and reset everything correctly.