massive idiot please help

bigredni · 10 Feb 2011 at 01:22

hey basically what i have done is i have 3x ata channel 0 and 3x ata channel 1 in the device manager and i have unticked the "enable DMA" option in all of them, (i did not know that stood for direct memory access, the time

) subsequently crashing my system. now my system starts up but were it should load the windows desktop, it just sits on a black screen, and occasionaly i get an error message "the instruction at 0x...... referenced memory at 0x..... . the memory cannot be written"

please please help if you can

EniGmA1981 · 10 Feb 2011 at 06:05

Hold F8 just after the POST screen, that'll display a menu with the option to boot into safe mode... Should let you change it then

bigredni · 10 Feb 2011 at 10:17

sigh i was trying that, but still the blank screen appears, even tried getting to it through the safe mode with command prompt, then using command prompt to load the device manager, but the device manager just crashes every time i try to go into the properties of the ata channel.

does anyone know if ressetting the bios would help? i know it will turn of my OC but it looks like i dont have a choice

BIGBC · 10 Feb 2011 at 10:18

As it is a windows setting I wouldnt expect the BIOS to affect it.

Try putting the OS disk in and running the repair tool?

groovesection · 10 Feb 2011 at 10:21

simply try unplugging all SATA drives and just plug in the OS drive.
Once in Windoze try enabling the DMA option on the controller. shut down then plug back in all other drives.

boot and keep fingers crossed

bigredni · 10 Feb 2011 at 10:27

1st try the os disk, then ill try unplugging things.may not have time to try option 2 until later. but heres hoping

Toughnoodle · 10 Feb 2011 at 11:37

Try the F8 menu and select last known good configuration. It should load the hardware profile from before you made the change.

bigredni · 10 Feb 2011 at 14:34

no that didnt work either. lol. gona try unplugging stuff then its on to a fresh install of windows i guess

Purgatory · 10 Feb 2011 at 18:41

Try setting in the bios for all the drives to PIO and then try boot back into windows. If it allows you to boot back into windows set the drives/controllers back up to DMA in windows then restart and go back into the bios and set all drives back up to Auto or DMA. If that fails you are going to need to go into the recovery console and copy the registry files to another machine and edit them there to add back the DMA settings and then copy them back to the faulty pc. This is hard work btw to do that and maybe easier just to reistall or repair windows. It is fixable the problem you have but can take a lot of time to get it right again. Sorry to say is don't play with hardrive controller settings or install wrong drivers for them that will totaly break windows and 2 things will happen is it will blue screen even before hitting the login screen or stall after the login screen.

bigredni · 11 Feb 2011 at 10:59

Update on the Solution. thanks guys for the help, purgatory, that's a little advanced for me

, but i see how it would fix the problem. thankfully a friend in my flat partitioned the hard drive and backed up all my files, then we reinstalled windows, that fixed the problem and i could retrieve all my files. so yea the easy way out of this situation is reinstall windows unfortunately (as you gotta reinstall all your programs).
Moral of the story is don't mess with properties of devices in your device manager, especially ones that don't even come with a warning. lol