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Strange DMA problem with A7V8X-X
Hi,
I was trying to get my daughter's PC ready for her going back to college, and ran across a strange problem. I was able to get around it, but am still puzzled by it, so I thought someone here might have some idea of what was going on. The PC had: MB: Asus A7V8X-X CPU: Duron 850 RAM: 1x512MB PC2700 HD: 1x60GB (don't remember brand) DVD: generic 10X CD/RW: TDK 32X (I think) OS: Windows XP Home SP1 Originally, we had the HD on primary master, the DVD on secondary master and CD/RW on secondary slave, and I think it was working. A couple of months ago, before summer, she was not able to burn CDs. A couple of weeks ago, my son replaced the TDK CD/RW with his Plexwriter 40X, but he didn't do any testing, and this is what I "inherited". IDE drivers were the generic MS/Via drivers that install with Windows XP Home. When I first started looking at it, she could burn CDs, but got high CPU usage and you could see the buffer during the burn going really low. I first checked DMA, and the CDRW was showing "PIO" even though "DMA if possible" was selected. So I tried the 'set to PIO, then set to DMA' trick, and it kept saying PIO. After doing some searching, I found a post saying to set it to "DMA if possible", then delete the IDE in Device Manager, and reboot. I did that, and sure enough, after the reboot, it showed "UDMA 2". But the problem was that I couldn't burn at all using Nero. It kept giving me a "device fault" error. Tried switching IDE cables, and switching position of the DVD and IDE on the IDE cable (both drives had cable select), to no avail. Just by accident, I was testing with just the CD/RW on the IDE cable, and to my surprise, it was working!! I put the DVD back on the IDE cable (as slave), and after reboot, Device manager showed the CD/RW as "PIO" again. Mind you, both the DVD and CD/RW were listed as "UDMA2" by the BIOS display through all of this. Anyway, by this time, it was about 04:00, and I just happened to have a Siig Ultra ATA 100 PCI card extra. I put the CD/RW as secondary master, and the DVD on one of the ports on the Siig card. When I rebooted, everything was working perfectly. DVD playing was fine, and I could burn CDs with low CPU usage. My conclusion is that somehow, the DVD and the CD/RW were interfering with each other when they were on the same IDE channel. But, I know that the CD/RW was good, because it was working in my son's machine before he moved it over. I guess I'm happy that it's working now, but I'm still puzzled by why I couldn't get both the DVD and CD/RW to UDMA2 when on the same IDE... I suppose the one possibility that I didn't test was using a different DVD drive, since I don't have a spare. Jim |
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