PIO mode detector???

[AlecWest]

I'm looking for a software tool that may not exist (grin). But if it does, I'd like to acquire it. The tool would work in the background but, if it notices an attempted change of an IDE channel from DMA mode to PIO mode, would:

(1 - Good) - Give me a screen telling me of the change and giving me the option to uninstall the channel and reboot.

(2 - Better) - Give me a "YES or NO" option screen before the switch.

(3 - Best) - Give me a simple popup screen telling me that the switch was attempted but stopped.

If anyone knows of such software, point me toward it. I really hate burning coasters and/or reading disks at 1x.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[IKnowNothing]

Assuming you are using a windows OS then you already have it except you don't get a popup!!!
Basically you use regedit to reset the IDE control back to DMA and then set a flag to force DMA after every successful access.

Once updated you need to reboot for the changes to take effect.

I've attached a program written in Visual Basic which makes the changes for you - I've used it on XP to resolve a problem where a
faulty CD-ROM was forcing PIO mode all the time and once set it never changed.

M

[AlecWest]

Thanks ... but I know how to fix the problem. The issue for me is that Windows does this mode change silently, without any notice. And I was looking for a utility that tells me when it happens - so I can fix it before I do any burning/reading of disks.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[redwudz]

If you ever find such a program, send it to Microsoft. I understand why a PC defaults to PIO, but I've always felt it was incredibly idiotic that the OS didn't inform you of this or offer to change it back. To me that's always been a major flaw with OSs. I suppose you could write a program to monitor the registry flags and create a pop up when the drive reverts to PIO mode.

[Ai Haibara]

Yeah, right. These are the people who think "Hide extensions for known file types" should be an option enabled by default.

[IKnowNothing]

The thing about the utility is that not only does it reset the UDMA flags but it sets another flag that means that Windoze will automatically reset to UDMA after a fall back to PIO (at least once a successful access has occurred). So in effect it makes the problem go away.

If you wanted to monitor it then you need to look in the registry at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\

In there you will find the control data for each IDE channel (the utility supports up to 1000) master and slave (that's 2000 devices!)
It should then be simple enough to to write a utility to monitor each and give you your popup
Personally I just don't see the point when the OS can deal with it automatically even if Micro$soft in their wisdom decide to
disable this feature by default.

For those who are old enough - remember Edlin - and you see the mentality of Mr Gates

[AlecWest]

I suppose you could write a program to monitor the registry flags and create a pop up when the drive reverts to PIO mode.

I wish I was smart enough to write my own programs (sigh). But, I figured that if anyone could write a program like that, it would have to be Doug Knox:

http://www.dougknox.com

So, I visited his website, sent him a PayPal donation (thanking him for utilities I've already used), and asked if he might consider doing some R&D on a simple program that merely gives you an "alert" when the DMA-to-PIO switch takes place. I'll let everyone know if he responds favorably ... and ask Baldrick to put up a "tool" page highlighting it. Knox's utilities have saved my bacon more than once.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[jman98]

Microsoft deliberately does this in XP as a conscious decision. It's really a case of "it's not a bug, it's a feature" kind of thing. They really meant for it to do this. I cannot say what other versions of Windows do with regards to this situation, but it's definitely doing it in XP because Microsoft wanted it that way.

I have some info at home on it. Basically what happens is that there is some kind of counter variable in the registry that gets set to an insanely low value like maybe 4 or some other really low value. It's an error count. Once the error count reaches the variable limit, the burner gets set to PIO mode automatically. One solution is to use regedit to re-set that counter to the maximum value it can hold, which is something like FFFFFFFF. Then you can re-set the device to DMA and reboot and it will work forever in DMA mode. It's obviously not very difficult for the error counter to be reached at the default value because this happens all the time.

Many people claim that you can always re-set the burner to DMA mode in the Device Manager, but that NEVER worked for me. NEVER. It was only after I reset the counter variable to the max that I was able to get the device to re-set to DMA mode. If you reset the counter to the max, it will never be reached (well, for most of us anyway, but there's probably one guy out there who could find a way to do it accidentally) so your burner will always stay in DMA mode. Just my opinion, but I'm not sure how useful it is to get a utility to advise you when this happens. IKnowNothing has a way to deal with this too. And what's this stuff about "burning coasters" in PIO mode? PIO mode is as slow as it can be, but I've never burned a coaster in PIO mode. Maybe your discs just aren't very good. I don't think it is possible to prevent the switch to PIO unless the program you are paying for deals with the error counter issue. It's built into XP to do that by design. It's a very good question as to whether or not Microsoft should have done that at all or put the error counter very low by default to make it so easy to trigger it, but we can't do anything about their stupid design decisions.

[AlecWest]

I have some info at home on it. Basically what happens is that there is some kind of counter variable in the registry that gets set to an insanely low value like maybe 4 or some other really low value. It's an error count. Once the error count reaches the variable limit, the burner gets set to PIO mode automatically. One solution is to use regedit to re-set that counter to the maximum value it can hold, which is something like FFFFFFFF. Then you can re-set the device to DMA and reboot and it will work forever in DMA mode.

Where would I find this registry location so I can reset the value? I searched for the location mentioned by IKnowNothing but couldn't find it (I use WinXP MCE - which is an XP Pro variant). BTW, I've always used the Device Manager method to fix things ... on this computer and on my 2000 Pro SP4 desktop. And, it's always worked. But, if there's some hidden "counter" counting down in my registry, I'd like to find and modify it before it zeroes out and puts me in a PIO mode that only the Device Manager method can fix.

And what's this stuff about "burning coasters" in PIO mode?

Coasters "by design" actually. There's no way I (or most other people) would wait an hour for a DVD to burn.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[IKnowNothing]

The info I used can be found here http://winhlp.com/node/10
specifically look under item 6 Re-Enable DMA .....

also

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472 describes the use of "ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess" to stop your IDE device falling back to PIO mode

The hidden counter BTW is MasterIdDataChecksum but I'm not sure how it works 'cos it doesn't look like a"counter" to me.

[AlanHK]

Not automatic, but the latest version of ImgBurn has an option on its "Tools" menu to "Reset DMA" that will do that.

[jman98]

AlecWest - I had to reinstall XP a couple of months ago on my PC and I think all the info is on my old hard drive, which is not attached at present. It's rather painful for me to do that at present and I don't really have enough time to deal with it right now.

However, I did find the following via a Google search which suggests that instead of resetting the counter to the maximum that certain values simply be deleted. Instructions on what to do are contained within. Honestly, this might well be a better approach.
http://winhlp.com/node/10
Look specifically at section 6. If I remember correctly, the reference in that section to setting MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed to 0xFFFFFFFF is what I did. Note that all this stuff presumes that you know how to use regedit correctly. Hopefully the info here will get you going.

[AlecWest]

Thanks, jman98 and IKnowNothing. I'm going to peruse that winhlp.com article thoroughly before I try anything. I did find the "MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed" entry 4 times in my registry - and all are set to 0xFFFFFFFF. However, the site mentions two other entries named "MasterDeviceTimingMode" and "UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed." While I didn't find any entries for the latter, I did find entries for the former - and they have different DWORD values. So, I'll put my thinking cap on and see what I come up with ... and (grin) will back up my registry before I tinker.

Again, thanks.

Regards,
J. Alec West