How do you set a hardrive from PIO to DMA?

Nitefly · 21 Jan 2007 at 11:17

Heya there. I have a piece of software which requires DMA mode on my harddrive, but it seems to enjoy PIO...... and keeps resetting itself to it, most frustrating!

The only way I can get around this is by going:
System -> Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers

And then uninstalling all of the primary and secondary IDE channels.

On a reboot, my harddrive appears to be in DMA mode, hoorah. But a restart or two later, its back to PIO. Its a pain in the arse everytime I wish to use this software

Please help!

Thanks for your time

FatRakoon · 21 Jan 2007 at 13:18

Have you tried setting it in the BIOS?

Dureth · 21 Jan 2007 at 13:43

Restart, make sure its set in the BIOS and then when in windows set the device manager to that also.

ghgh · 21 Jan 2007 at 18:05

What motherboard is the system using?

I seem to remember a few old socket A motherboards that had this problem that required you to run an app. then do a registry edit to sort it to make it stick in DMA mode.

Lee · 23 Jan 2007 at 13:20

I had this problem with a 200 GB Seagate drive I bought a while back. Basically my on board IDE controller could not cope with the UDMA133 speed rating of my drive. This generated CRC errors. If 5 (think it's 5) consecutive CRC errors were generated, Windows (XP SP2) would default the communication to the drive to PIO. I only noticed the problem as one of the games I was playing at the time just would not run properley. Took about 2 weeks and 3 rebuilds to work it out. I just bought a cheap (£10 ish) PCI IDE controller (which also had raid capability), and connected my new disk to that. Problem sorted, a few more grey hairs, but got there in the end !

You could reset to DMA, but it would always go back to PIO because of the consecutive CRC errors. Check Event Viewer for CRC errors.