Trouble with DVD Drives

[Cody_L]

First off, I'm working on my uncles PC. It seems that anytime a program tries to access either of his DVD drives, video and/or audio begin to skip. This only began happening recently and working on it through this morning I think I know whats going on. I've checked the IDE Controllers in the device manager earlier to see if DMA was enabled on the drives. Well, it was enabled on one but the other was in PIO Mode. The one that was in a DMA mode didn't cause any skipping but the other did. Just a few moments ago the other drive began making everything skip/slow down and after checking, sure enough it was in PIO Mode now.

So what I need to know is how to make them stay in a DMA mode. Or if you think the drives just might be starting to fail...

Here are some of his PC specs...
MoBo- ASRock 4CoreDual-Sata2
Processor- Pentium D Dual Core 1.8Ghz
Ram- 2GB
Drives (DVD)- SH-S202G
SH-S202N

Please provide any help you can

[minidv2dvd]

you might try a new 80pin cable.

drop down to PIO is caused by too many read errors and windows will keep doing it even after you get them back to dma if the errors recur.

[redwudz]

Usually optical drives revert to PIO mode when trying to read damaged discs. If the discs aren't damaged, then it could be a problem with the drives, the controller or the cables. But this doesn't happen that often.

To restore them to DMA mode, uninstall the IDE channels they are on, then reboot the PC. If they continue to fall back into PIO mode, you may have to make some changes in the registry. Back up the registry first.

One article on the problem: http://winhlp.com/node/10

And welcome to our forums.

[Cody_L]

Thanks for the welcome. And uninstalling the controller seemed to do the trick redwudz. It seems like everything is working now, although I'll keep the article for some late night reading.

Thanks again both of you.