Stuck in PIO mode

[Diggar]

I have a MSI Delta K7N2 Delta system with Win2K and 2 hard drives on one cable. Drive C is a WD 80GB drive and drive D is a Maxtor 120 GB drive. The WD drives always runs in UltraDMA mode.

The Maxtor drive only runs in PIO mode when I check the ide channel. If I plug another drive onto that connector and check the channel it will run in UltraDMA mode. I even switched to a new C drive with WinXp on it and the Maxtor still ran in PIO.

Maxtor sent me a new drive and it will only run in PIO mode. So I went back to my Win2K setup and plugged in 3 different drives to that connector and they all came up UltraDMA.

I plugged the 2 maxtors in (testing each one seperately) and they came up in PIO. I even uninstalled the channels and had windows reinstall them.

This is driving me crazy as the Maxtor drive is my capture drive and is killing me because it is so slow.

Any ideas on what may be stopping the Maxtor drive from running full speed??

Thanks

 

[Dreamland]

Diggar - what happens when you take the second IDE channel (your CD ROMS, etc.) and connect only the Maxtor to it? Hard jumper the Maxtor to 'Master' and make sure it's on the outer connector of that cable. Obviously not a permanent solution, but I'm wondering if your BIOS is forcing PIO mode.

When the drive is connected as a slave on the first channel, what does the BIOS set the drive up as? It will usually say on the first CMOS settings screen if it's autoconfiguring the drive. Can you change any of the settings in setup? Sometimes the autoconfigure will do odd things like disable 32-bit transfers or force lower (or no) UDMA states.

Do you have a way to test (or just detect) the speed using DOS vs. 2K? It would at least pinpoint it to a W2K issue rather than BIOS or whatever.

The only other thing I would say to try is see if you can scrounge up one of those PCI controller cards to test the drive. The BIOS on the newer cards has much more capability than Award or AMI builds into their controllers and you can usually see/adjust more drive parameters. They're fairly cheap and - although you shouldn't have to resort to this - it may 'solve' your problem for whatever reason.

I wouldn't go out and do this just yet. I've not heard of any general problem like this between Maxtors and MSI controllers, so it's probably worth trying to figure out a solution on your current setup. I have a crate of them that go for $15, so it's just cheaper for my customers (in many cases) to use one of those rather than paying me for a half-hour or more of time trying to figure out why xxx bios will not cooperate with brand yyy drive. If the drive refuses to operate at it's rated UDMA speed on the PCI controller, then I have identified the drive as the problem.

 

[Diggar]

Interesting. I placed the Maxtor drive on the cable alone and installed Win2K on it and the drive came up UltraDMA. I then stuck the 80 GB WD as the slave and they both came up UltraDMA.

So now I am reformatting the 80GB and going to reinstall Win2k on it and then slap the Maxtor on as the slave and see what happens.

I seem to remember a long time ago and issue with Maxtor and WD together.

I'll let ya know. Thanks