My DMA - PIO Fix

[EdwardATeller]

Summary:

I fixed a hard drive that was using PIO mode instead of DMA by switching IDE controllers.

Long-Winded Explanation:

I had a STV setup that worked pretty good, but I couldn't leave it alone. I thought I'd add another 500 GB Seagate ATA drive and use it as a dedicated video drive, formatted to 64k block size, and fix the last remaining stutters I had. Bought the drive, put it in, and didn't see much improvement, but I did hear more noise. I thought, Oh well, I'll use the new drive as an external backup. I put it in an old external enclosure I had, fooled around with the Firewire and USB 2.0 connections, and I had a lot of trouble getting it work consistently. At some point, I shut the system down as it was recognizing the drive. On reboot, I had a weird video issue where I only saw the top left corner of the screen, but another reboot fixed it. This problem happened a few times as I messed around.

Put the extra hard drive back in the system on the secondary IDE channel, and now the main drive was incredibly slow. Turns out the main drive had downshifted to PIO mode. Don't know if it was a result of messing with the external, but that is the only significant thing I remember doing. Went to sleep on the problem, woke up this morning looking forward to fixing it. I found this article useful:

http://winhlp.com/node/10

Haven't read every single word of it, but I don't think it mentions my solution. Since I had one drive working right, and one not working, I just switched IDE controllers they were on, changed the boot preference in BIOS, and now it is working like a charm.

Some notes, both drives are jumpered to master and are on separate IDE controllers. Reinstalling the Primary IDE channel per the article worked temporarily, but my problem is that multiple ATAPI errors (mostly 9 and some 11), as seen in the event viewer, caused the drive to downshift from DMA to PIO mode. This was triggered by copying a large file. Doing an XP system restore also temporarily fixed the problem. I was able to use STV for some time as long as the video was recorded to the good drive, and I didn't try to copy a large file between the drives. Once the main drive shifted to PIO mode, STV's GUI was severely impacted.

Also, this morning on a reboot, I got a message that the BIOS was incorrect, press F1 to enter the BIOS and F2 to reload the CMOS values. This happened more than once, but seems to be ok for now. I am busy copying a few hundred GB between the drives, and hopefully it will go well. HD Tune was useful as I tried to fix the problem:

http://www.hdtune.com/

The Seagate utility never showed any errors, but I didn't do the long self test. The hard drive is relatively new and hopefully still good. I am now suspecting a funky IDE issue. My error 9 from the Event Viewer - System is:

The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort1, did not respond within the timeout period.

My error 11 is:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

Seems like the error 11's have stopped, and I still get error 9's here and there, but no PIO mode yet. The 9's happened on both the IDE channels, but the error 11 only happened on the bad channel before the fix.

Posting this for my records, and maybe this will help someone else.

[RobJ]

I've had problems like that several times, and the one tip that has always worked for me was the deletion of the MasterIdDataCheckSum and/or SlaveIdDataCheckSum values, followed by a reboot. This tip is buried well down on the page you linked. Apparently when one of these keys is missing, the OS will re-analyze the modes, and restore them to full speed.

You should be aware though that this can sometimes be an early indication of a drive that is starting to fail.