My HD has gone into PIO mode and is intolerably slow

  • Thread starter Thread starter Martyn Cole
  • Start date Start date
M

Martyn Cole

I'm running Win2K SP4 with a 120Gb Western Digital Hard Drive.

I had a problem with my disk drive, the disk was corrupted when I had a
power outage and now, even though I have restored from a backup the
drive, only works in PIO mode and is working at a snails pace.

Has anyone got a way of resetting my system so the drive goes back into
a DMA node. I used a utility from Western Digital that says the drive
is working OK.

Regards
 
Edit registry:
HKLM\System\CCS\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

0000 - IDE controller itself - reg_dword "EnableUDMA66", value 1.
0001 - primary channel,
0002 - secondary channel.

Both channels, dwords:
MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed 0xFFFFFFFF
SlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed 0xFFFFFFFF
UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed 0xFFFFFFFF
UserSlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed 0xFFFFFFFF
and
MasterDeviceTimingMode 0xFFFF or 0xFFFFF
SlaveDeviceTimingMode 0xFFFF or 0xFFFFF
or
for Multi-Word DMA Mode 2 and PIO4 (burners, very old HDDs...) - 0x0410
for Ultra ATA33 (CDROMs, DVDs, old HDDs...) - 0x2010
for Ultra ATA66 (just HDDs) - 0x8010
for Ultra ATA100 (modern HDDs) - 0x10010
for Ultra ATA133 (ultramodern HDDs) - 0x12010
 
The easy way to reset hard drive to DMA..

Go to

start
settings
control panel
system
hardware
device manager

Right click on Intel PCI Bus Master IDE Controller and select UNINSTALL.
All of your IDE controller lines should disappear.

Then reboot computer.

Windows will reinstall the IDE controllers and should set DMA hard drives to
DMA.

After the reboot check your CDROM(s) and set them from PIO to DMA, if
necessary.

This worked for me.

Apparently, if there are transfer problems with your hard drive, the
transfer speed gets downgraded but is not automatically upgraded.

Doing the above forces Windows to start over at the appropriate transfer
speed.
 
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