No DMA - Just PIO

[micker377]

K7S5a mobo. Win XP Home SP-2. ST330621A hard drive. Capable of up to Ultra DMA mode 5. During boot it shows DMA 5. When in Windows, I try to set to DMA and can't. It says "DMA if available", but all I can get is PIO. Master (alone). Tried new 80 pin cable. Any ideas?

 

[ski]

You may be ok selecting 'DMA if available'.
Check here:

http://www.real-knowledge.com/dma.htm

 

[micker377]

That's the problem, "DMA if available" is checked. In fact the list is:

Channel one master (hard drive) is PIO.
Channel one slave is open (nothing hooked up there).
Channel two master (CD player) is PIO.
Channel two slave (DVD burner) is DMA.

All are set as "DMA if available".

 

[ski]

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

 

[micker377]

Nope, MS didn't do it. Tried changing, and delete both - no joy. Swapped in a Win98 drive, checked DMA, and it worked fine. So it's down to bad hard drive (doubtful, as it works fine in PIO mode), or Win XP SP-2.

 

[wolluf]

Have you tried swapping controllers - putting the hard drive on the secondary & CD/DVDs on primary?

 

[micker377]

HUH! How can the computer boot with the "active" drive on the secondary?

 

[Freestone]

Most BIOS' these days allow you to specify what hard drive to boot from, and looking at the manual for a K7S5A version 3.X/3.1 I see that the Advanced Setup page does allow this. Wolluf's suggestion is probably viable one, but look in your BIOS first.

 

[garebo]

Right here in this forum there is a person explaining how win xp set itself up on their slave drive instead of their master drive, so i guess it can be done if bios allows.




Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[Freestone]

I know it can be done on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe as I have had first hand experience with it when I cloned my older drive (Secondary Master) to a new 250GB drive (Primary Master). Through BIOS I was able to select which drive would be the 1st to boot, and both booted XP fine.

 

[micker377]

Nope. Tried swapping channel one and channel channel two, won't even boot to bios - computer looking for channel one master. Tried IDE 1,2, and 3 (native is IDE 0)(ver 3.9 mobo).