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February 28, 2002 at 12:44 AM
abe froman

Windows XP and hard drive DMA issue

by abe froman . Updated 23 years, 10 months ago

I have an AMD 1.2 GH processor on an ECS K7VMA motherboard (with the VIA chipset) with 256 MB of RAM and a Western Digital WD300BB (Caviar) hard drive (7200 RPM’s). It dual boots to 98 SE and XP (98 was installed first). The hard drive is connected to IDE 1 and the CD-ROM and CD burner are connected to IDE 2 with ATA 80 ribbon cables. The hard drive jumper has been removed (sets the HD as neutral) on the IDE 1 and CD-ROM is master and CD burner is slave on IDE 2. Here’s the problem: In 98,the HD is seen as running in DMA mode. When I boot to XP, the IDE device is set to “DMA if available” but it is running in PIO mode. Any ideas why? I have loaded the VIA IDE drivers for both 98 and XP, but to no avail. A document at the Microsoft site tells me to run debug in DOS mode and issue a series of instructions in order to receive a value at the end. The value returned does, indeed, tell me that the HD is running in DMA mode. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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