Here is some information that you can check in a couple of minutes on your own PC.
Hopefully it will be useful to some, with apologies to those who already know this like the back of their hand. I have searched the forum and the wiki to see if there is already a comprehensive write-up about this, but didnt find one. I have placed the thread in this forum, as the problem will often be provoked by the action of securely ripping a disc, especially if that disc has errors. This information is for Windows XP users, although I believe it also applies to Vista. For Mac and Linux, perhaps someone else could comment. It applies to the IDE devices that most of use, but I am not sure if it is true for PATA and SATA. In this post I will describe the problem, and the fixes (of which there are two levels), and provide some links to articles with screenshots. Transfer Mode: There are two basic transfers modes for IDE devices, DMA and PIO mode. DMA mode (Direct Memory Access) is much faster than PIO mode (Programmed Input Output). PIO mode also uses the CPU to control the access, and thus a device that is operating in this mode can pull a significant CPU percentage to operate. DMA mode has a number of levels (speeds) depending on the speed of the device. Typically a HDD will operate at DMA Mode Level 5, whereas a CD-RW may only operate at DMA Mode Level 2. Modern HDDs, DVD drives, and CD-RW drives can all use DMA mode, whereas most older CD-ROM drives cannot. When initially installed, windows will set the best mode for the drive. The Problem: Windows protects the user from bad drives corrupting data by monitoring the amount of CRC and timeout errors and if it encounters more than six such errors it downgrades the mode. Eventually it will downgrade the drive to PIO mode. See the for repeated DMA errors section here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/ide-dma.mspx My experience is that this action can easily be provoked by secure ripping a CD that has some difficult to read sectors. Additionally, if the optical drive you are using shares an IDE channel with your system HDD, it may also downgrade the transfer mode of the HDD as well. If only the optical drive is affected, then you will find that rips will be slower, and the performance of the entire machine will be adversely affected when the drive is being used. If, however, the HDD is affected, then your PC will suddenly start acting like a slug. Performance will be totally destroyed, and you will have major problems running applications at any speed. I would very likely cause dropout problems with SS or SC7 due to the overloading of the CPU. I have experienced this. Checking: Fortunately checking is easy and quick. First you need to open Device Manager, which you can do by clicking Start, then right click My Computer, select Properties, click the Hardware tab, and then the Device Manager button. Once the device manager has opened, click on the plus next to the entry for IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers. There you will see entries for the primary and secondary IDE channels. For each channel in turn, right click on the entry, and select Properties. Click the Advanced Settings tab and you will be able to see the modes for each of the two possible devices on the channel. If when you do this the Current Transfer Mode for all devices is set to DMA mode, then you have no problem, and can go away happy. If one or more of the devices is set to PIO mode, then you should fix this. First Fix: There is an initial process to try and reset the mode. Unfortunately this will often not work, but it should be attempted. What you need to do is to toggle the mode to convince windows to reset the device. This is done as follows: >From the dialogue you used to check the current mode, select PIO only as the transfer mode from the drop down menu. OK out of the dialogue, and then reboot. Once you have rebooted, return to this dialogue and select DMA where available as the transfer mode from the drop down menu. Once again OK out of the dialogue, and reboot. Return again to this dialogue, and check to see if the current transfer mode has now been set to DMA mode. If you are very lucky this will have worked, and you need not do anything else. Second Fix: Very often Windows refuses to play ball with the first fix. This was supposed to have been dealt with in XP SP2, but in my experience this is untrue. If you cannot get out of PIO mode using the first fix, then you have two options: either uninstall the IDE channel, or edit the registry. I prefer not to edit the registry, but details of how to do this are included in some of the links I have included below. Personally I use the uninstall option. To uninstall the channel, right click its entry in the Device Manager, and click uninstall. At this point windows will warn you about what you are about to do, click yes to continue, and then reboot the machine. When the machine reboots it should automatically find you uninstalled channel, and reinstall it. WARNING: it has been written that if you uninstall the channel containing the HDD with windows on it, that you may have a problem reinstalling. I have done this with no problems on a couple of my machines, but I cannot guarantee this for other peoples machines. This normally applies to the primary channel. If you are nervous about this, then use the registry edit described in the links. Useful Links, some with screenshots: http://www.techmind.org/dvd/index.html http://www.cdrlabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7625 http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=DMA_mode or try googling dma pio mode xp -- bigfool1956 David Ayers Music is what counts, hifi just helps us enjoy it more ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bigfool1956's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13782 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=44696
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