Navigation
Popular content
Today's:Active forum topics
Recent comments
|
DMA reverts to PIO
The stuttering DVD drive or the lame hard diskQuick solutionIf you're not interested in the details, but just want to fix this problem as quickly as possible:
Earlier user reports from 2007-04-04 to 2007-07-21 indicated that the program resetdma.vbs has:
Please note that this works only with the Windows drivers. If your device had its own manufacturer's drivers installed, this program cannot fix the problem and will not do anything to them. Instead it will report that no resettable DMA channels were found. Note also that many CD and DVD drives only use UDMA-2, because their data rate is much lower than that of a hard disk. This is normal and no reason to worry. If you are interested in the details, read on. The program tries to reenable DMA in the registry exactly as described below, for all suitable ATA channels. Windows then redetects the DMA status after the next reboot. General descriptionThis article also applies to Windows 2000. (Peter Frank reported successful application on Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4.) DMA is an abbreviation for Direct Memory Access, an access method for external devices where the data transfer is not done by the central processor, but by a small special processor called DMA controller. It uses a procedure called cycle stealing, where the central processor memory access cycles are delayed for very short times to intersperse DMA controller memory access cycles. Some newer, faster DMA modes are called UDMA (Ultra DMA). The alternative, slow and inefficient data transfer mode is called PIO, Programmed Input-Output, where the central processor transfers data byte for byte or word for word. This requires many processor commands for each data word and therefore causes a high and unwanted processor load. Possible causes for falling back to PIO modeThe most frequent use why a CD or DVD port falls back to PIO mode is a scratched or otherwise unreadable CD or DVD. However, there are a few reasons why a computer may use PIO instead of DMA, particularly when it's the hard disk port that falls back, not a CD/DVD drive port. For example, David Duberman reported in 2005 that some Dell computers have DMA disabled in their BIOS by default for the second hard disk. So it is a good idea to check the BIOS settings first. 2007-05-13 – Jason Paquette confirmed that the BIOS setting in his Dell computer was wrong too and prevented DMA mode. Correcting the BIOS setting immediately enabled the DMA mode. A not so rare hardware problem is a bad or too long IDE data cable. You need 80-way cables, not the older ones with only 40 wires. With poor cables the device may work, but Windows will probably step down to lower DMA speeds or even to PIO. A further cause may be waking from standby mode, if one of the involved components does not perform this process correctly. 2007-02-20 – Stefan Welte wrote that on an Elitegroupsystems K7S5A computer all IDE hard disks ran in PIO mode, because automatic device recognition was disabled in the BIOS. (The computer booted from a SCSI disk.) Enabling device recognition solved the problem without any further measures. Occasionally a chip set or controller driver is buggy, so check with the manufacturer for updates. 2007-03-01 – Francois Eraud reports one such case in a Sony laptop, regarding an ALI M5229 chip set controller, solved with driver version 4.008. 2008-03-30 – Arran located the elusive drivers for this ALI M5229 controller chip. Please read his comment below. Other reasons can show up in the event log, so check this first and see if you can find repeated Atapi errors recorded. If so, you likely have a hardware defect. You can use the procedures described on this page, but your computer will probably fall back to PIO mode again and again, until you solve the underlying problem, which may be located inside the device, on the motherboard, or in the IDE data cable and its connectors. A dramatic example was reported on 2006-12-29 by David Hähningen:
2007-02-07 – Carl Kaufmann wrote that he looked for a solution for a computer with an Intel chip set and found the Intel(R) Application Accelerator. As instructed, he first installed the Intel Chip Set Installation Utility, which already solved the problem (as observed in Task Manager). He went on anyway to install the accelerator. After that there was no longer any DMA/PIO choice in the controller options, but everything now works right automatically. 2007-05-15 – John Schumacher confirms:
The Intel Application Accelerator can also have a quite adverse effect when it is run on an unsuitable processor. If in doubt, uninstall it and retest. (See this comment, "Intel Application Accelerator", by dkneyle = Ausie Davo.) The trapWindows contains a trap in which quite a few computers seem to get caught sooner or later. The trap was described in a Web article whose link no longer works (and also in another one mentioned below): The crucial paragraphs are:
Of course, drive firmware being quite complex and certainly containing programming defects of its own, it is not all that difficult to produce such errors. In my case a scratched DVD and later also an unreadable (overburned) CD did the trick, got the drive to choke and Windows to disable DMA for good. Later my hard disk hiccupped just once and also went back to PIO for good. I had been using my laptop for DVD viewing for years, until I inserted a borrowed and heavily scratched DVD. The player and apparently even the DVD drive choked on it, and when I finally got the DVD to play, I found that playing was jerky and processor load was 100%, roughly half of which was system overhead. This indicated that the drive had reverted from the usual UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) mode 2 to PIO (Programmed Input Output) mode. No amount of resetting or changing the relevant registry parameters from 1 (try DMA) to 2 (force DMA) helped. Stubbornly the drive kept using PIO mode, and Windows even changed these settings back to 0 (use PIO only). The following text will refer to the secondary IDE port because that is more often affected, but essentially the same also holds for the primary IDE port, to which the main hard disk is connected in most computers. Before you begin to work on the problem, log on as Administrator or as a user with administrator rights. Check Your IDE Port ModeFirst check what mode your secondary IDE port is currently working in. Go to Device Manager: right-click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Hardware tag, click on the Device Manager button, click on the plus sign to the left of IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller, double-click on the secondary IDE channel, click on Extended Settings and check whether it is set to DMA when available. Directly underneath that setting is a grey field that shows the actual working mode of your IDE channel. You want the highest possible DMA or Ultra DMA mode there, and you definitely don't want PIO mode. If the Extended Settings tab is not there, perhaps another driver is used, probably from the manufacturer of the IDE ATAPI controller. You can still perform a simple test. In the Task Manager activate the option View, Show kernel times. Then put a high load on the device, for example by copying a large file, and check whether the kernel times are minimal (red line). If you observe considerable kernel times, roughly around half of the total load, then the device is running in PIO mode, which is bad. The whole purpose of the DMA mode is to relieve the processor (in kernel mode) of this load. Assuming the Microsoft IDE ATAPI driver, normally you don't have to use the registry editor, because the normal settings are also available through the properties dialog for the IDE port, but if you want to look at it anyway, the parameter for the secondary IDE port can be found through regedit.exe at
It is named Scsi only for historic reasons. Scsi Port 0 is the primary IDE port, to which presumably your hard disk is connected. After trying various remedies—in vain—I found the abovementioned article and went to work again. I uninstalled the DVD drive in Device Manager and rebooted, but that did not help either. So I searched for more and better information, then I went on and did the following. Re-enable DMA using the Registry EditorThis chapter describes the manual way to do what the quick solution at the top of this page does automatically through a script program. If you're not interested in the details, you can back up to the chapter "Quick solution" above and run the script. My thanks go to my fellow MVP Alexander Grigoriev who taught me this method. Run REGEDIT. Go to the following key:
It has subkeys like 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. Normally 0001 is the primary IDE channel, 0002 the secondary, but other numbers can occur under certain circumstances. You have to go through these subkeys and check the DriverDesc value until you find the proper IDE channel. Delete MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveIdDataChecksum, depending on whether the device in question is attached as master or slave, but it can't actually hurt to delete both. Reboot. The drive DMA capabilities will be redetected. Note that many CD and DVD drives only use UDMA-2, because their data rate is much lower than that of a hard disk. This is normal and no reason to worry. 2006-01-19 – Horst Schülke wrote that it is sufficient to empty the content of these values. But you can also delete the values entirely. Windows will automatically recreate them anyway, with new content. Open Device Manager again and check whether the device is now actually using DMA mode. If so, congratulations, you've made it (at least until the next time Windows disables DMA). If not, you may have to change the IDE channel setting from PIO back to the highest available DMA mode and reboot again. Many thanks to Tomáš Souček, Peter Götz, Alex Vaillant, and Cory Culbertson for piecing together the following information:
More information is needed. If you know anything, please click on Add new comment at the end of this article and write it down. Alternative Method—Uninstalling the Port1. Uninstall the secondary IDE portTo do that, open Device Manager as follows. Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Hardware tag, click on the Device Manager button, click on the plus sign to the left of IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller, right-click on Secondary IDE Channel, click on Uninstall. Deactivating is not enough. Reboot to make the changes active and permanent. After booting Windows will automatically reinstall the IDE channel and the DVD (or CD) drive. This Plug-n-Play process can take a little while, so give it a minute after the boot process finishes. 2. Check or reactivate DMABut this may not always be not enough, because unfortunately Windows does not always automatically activate DMA on a DVD or CD drive. You have to check and, if necessary, tell Windows to try to use DMA first. It is possible that Windows XP with Service Pack 2 re-enables DMA automatically on reboot, but I have not tested this yet. To re-enable DMA, go to Device Manager again. Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Hardware tag, click on the Device Manager button, click on the plus sign to the left of IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller, double-click on the secondary IDE channel, click on Extended Settings and change the relevant setting from PIO only to DMA when available. On Windows NT and 2000 you now have to reboot a second time, but Windows XP applies the change instantly. Then you can go to the same place in Device Manager again and check whether the device is now actually using DMA mode. If so, all is well. Note that many CD and DVD drives only use UDMA-2, because their data rate is much lower than that of a hard disk. This is normal and no reason to worry. 3. Driver is not intended for this platformIf you keep getting the following error message, please read on:
2005-03-30 – Johannes B. wrote: The reason for this error is often that Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% are installed. In this case the solution described below would not work. But when you uninstall these programs and then restart Windows, it will then install the device drivers without any further problems. If these programs are not installed, then one possible way out is to rename C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\atapi.sys (or a similar path on your computer) to something like atapi.old. If that's not possible, you can try it from the repair console (boot from the Windows install CD and select the repair console). If Windows always automatically recreates atapi.sys, you can try renaming it in safe mode or from a command line window or you can try to rename or remove it in the driver cache as well. Desensitize Your Computer's IDE ChannelsThere's a bit more to it. The following article offers a way to reduce the incidence of this problem, although it still doesn't solve it altogether. IDE ATA and ATAPI Disks Use PIO Mode After Multiple Time-Out or CRC Errors
Occur Do read this article because it contains a useful long-term workaround. But you have to go through the procedure described here to re-enable DMA first. Assuming you've done that, insert the ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess registry values mentioned in this article into both the primary and the secondary IDE port registry keys as described. Unfortunately this is only a half solution, because when you enter an unreadable DVD, you will get 6 errors in a row, and the IDE channel will revert to PIO mode, but at least when you pull out the DVD in time and then insert a good one, the error counter will be reset and it will at least be a bit more difficult for Windows to hobble your IDE drive. A little warning: One user reported that by mistakenly putting the value into the parent key, rather than into one of the 0000, 0001, 0002, etc., subkeys, he was accused by Microsoft's Genuine Advantage check of using a pirated copy of Windows and therefore denied online updates. EmailsUseful info on re-enabling DMA. No more jerky video from primary slave! Thank you Thank you for a very helpful article. After applying your fix I saw a 10x speed improvement! Don't mention it!!! After months of trouble-free operation, DVD playback suddenly started to crap out on me, and your site was the only one I could find that remedied this problem. I had been trying to fix it for several weeks when I found it, and boy was I happy. I'm the one who needs to thank *you*!!! Thank you!!! :) Thank you for the great page on DMA/PIO issues. I had a problem caused by Daemon tools that you covered on your page. Without your work I might never have solved this problem. I intend on donating again after my next paycheck. You ROCK! Your write-up on Windows setting DMA back to PIO saved me. I was about to take a 12 gauge to my computer. My DVD player wouldn't work for SHIT (stuttering, dropping frames, etc.). I uninstalled my secondary IDE controller, re-booted, & problem solved. THANKS! Your DMA reverts to PIO page relieved me from horrible sound stututustuttuttering. [...] Hard disk went from PIO mode back to Ultra DMA mode 5 when I uninstalled primary IDE channel in device manager and XP reinstalled it. Thanks. I love you... Wonderful Dude, I just wanted to thank you for the information [on this page]. After noticing
that my laptop's CD/DVD drive started exhibiting the dreaded "choppy playback"
from nowhere (probably caused by trying to read a poorly burned homework assignment
handed out by one of my professors a dozen times) I found your advice after a
quick search on how to correct the problem. After a few minutes of reading, using
the provided script, and rebooting, my drive successfully reverted back to DMA
mode from PIO. I also wanted to thank you. I almost despaired. For no
discernible reason all movies from my DVD drive became jerky. Cleaning the
registry and scanning for viruses were also unsuccessful. I was already
resigned to the thought of returning the laptop to the manufacturer, because I
thought the drive was broken. Luckily there is the Internet and dedicated
people like you, who help with good tips. Thank you very much for your online help to my DMA problem (DMA reverts to PIO). I had been banging my head against the wall for a few weeks before I found your site. The .vbs program worked perfectly to fix my infuriating iTunes & audio distortion problems. For this, I have donated $10 to your site. Comments, discussionTo add a comment, you have to have an account and be logged on. If you don't have an account yet, please click on: Create new account
|
User login
Donations If this web site has helped you, please help us too! Recent blog posts
Windows news ticker
Who's new
Who's online
There are currently 0 users and 5 guests online.
hits since 2007-11-01 |
Thank You
Thu, 2009-01-01 09:19 by jmelcer
Thank you for this helpful article. After several hours of experimenting (each restart ~ 7 min), I solved the problem in 5 min by making the registry change in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
One point of interest: My problems started immediately after experimenting with booting from a Fedora LiveUSB stick. When I then booted WINDOWS XP SP3 from the HD, HD was in PIO mode.
USB stick
Thu, 2009-01-01 13:58 by admin
Some USB sticks automatically install some rather evil software, like U3. If that happens, all bets are off, because the software includes a driver, and drivers can do all kinds of damage, as they run in ring 0 of the processor's protection hierarchy. I hope that you haven't become another victim of this kind of Trojan.
But it may have been pure coincidence. Difficult to tell, but over time you'll find out how often the problem reoccurs.
Thanks a ton!!!
Sun, 2008-12-28 05:54 by dilipkrbe
I read the whole article before I downloaded the quick fix. In my case it was the hard disk that was on PIO. the quick fix worked perfect. I just had to run it and restart, nothing further!
Thanks a ton!!!!
DMA PRoblem
Sat, 2008-12-27 00:09 by longhaireddwb
This might be in the wrong place and I'm sorry. I just don't know about this stuff. I'm a beginner when it comes to the computer and I've been learning so much the last four days and three forums trying to fix this problem.
I can't burn a copy or disc any faster than 0.87X and I'm using Roxio 10. I was told the problem is because of the PIO I can't get to change to DMA on the Primary IDE channel?
Here's a picture:
I can't get the PIO to change to MDA even after doing the "DMA Reverts to PIO" that I found on this site. I DL the RESETDMA program and did what it said and that still didn't do it. I've rebooted so many times I can't remember. I've uninstalled and rebooted. I've done so much stuff that others have told me to do for the last four days that I can't tell you all I've done and its still there and I still can't burn even a 1 to 1 speed.
Help me please...
PS. I've tried everything listed above that I could understand. Sorry, most of it is beyond me so I need some help in plain non-computer English!
I've tried everything listed except swapping the drives and I don't understand. Do you mean to physically take them out of the box and put in the others place or just swap the cables from one to the other? I have not tried the hotfix. Its just not clear enough for me to understand. I'm a beginner and I don't have a clue to what I'm doing!
Quick solution first
Sat, 2008-12-27 10:45 by admin
Try the quick solution first, which is described at the very top of the main article. You have to confirm twice and need to trust the program, but many people have used it successfully. After the program has finished doing its job, it reports what it has done. What did it report? You can run it again.
I guess Device 0 is your main hard disk and Device 1 is your DVD burner. This means that both devices are connected to the same data cable. This is a correct way to connect these drives, but it is not the best way. If you have fewer than 4 IDE/ATAPI devices, you should connect the hard disk to the end of the primary IDE port data cable and should not connect any other device to that same data cable.
Ideally you should connect DVD drives to the secondary IDE port, which has a separate data cable. There are a few pitfalls:
All this should already have been explained in the main article above. If you have problems with the technical stuff, no amount of explaining will do. In that case you have to seek the help of a technically oriented person who is willing to repair your computer.
Thank you for responding. I
Sat, 2008-12-27 14:52 by longhaireddwb
Thank you for responding. I guess I will just need to pay someone to fix it. I have never opened up the box and have no idea what is in there. Slaves and masters ans 40 and 80 cables? Don't sound like I should be in there anyway. I will print out what you said and try to find someone that understands it. Thanks for your time.
Uninstalling secondary ide channel controller
Wed, 2008-12-17 00:27 by gpsmall
I decided to try the alternative method of uninstalling the secondary ide controller channel and rebooting. This method worked like a charm on my 2 desktops with high-speed (20X) DVD re-writers. These re-writers had been running in PIO mode on both desktops (one ancient, the other a bit more recent) for some time and changing cables (as suggested by LG tech support) had no effect. It amazes me that Microsoft would cause its OS to downgrade from UDMA to PIO with so few errors and then not bother to publicize the problem and solution. I'm sure there is a high percentage of users with DVD re-writers running in PIO mode that have no idea it is correctable. Good work all!!!
Thanks a lot friends
Mon, 2008-12-08 10:14 by Tarasca
Hi friends.
After surfing a lot searching about low speed transfers with high use of Hardware Interrupts with disks and usb card reader, I found your nice fix for going back to DMA mode.
Every transfer speed is OK now.
Thanks a lot. My best regards.
USB card readers
Mon, 2008-12-08 17:41 by admin
Thanks for the kind words. I wasn't aware that the fix may affect USB card readers. Maybe it doesn't, and the cause of the slowness was just the hard disk. Still a success though.
Extended settings option gone
Thu, 2008-11-27 08:16 by godfather9
I recently noticed that my computer was running the primary IDE channel in PIO and was able to bring it back to Ultra DMA with the help of this article. I ended up using the resetdma.vbs link and it worked great. Unfortunately a few hours later the computer froze, and after rebooting I went to check the status of the DMA and noticed that I no longer had the extended settings option, which now of course does not even allow me the option of seeing if it reverted back or trying to adjust. Anyone seen this problem before?
Thanks in advance
Different driver
Thu, 2008-11-27 08:57 by admin
One possible explanation of several is that somehow a different driver got installed or was installed and got activated.
You can check in Device Manager which driver you are actually using. The quick fix repair script is only effective with Microsoft's IDE drivers that come with Windows. It has no effect on any other driver.
But, of course, something else could be broken. There are several possible causes. If all else fails, you could consider a Repair Installation, but without any guarantee that it solves the problem.
PIO problem solved
Fri, 2008-11-21 11:46 by GeorgeSA
I was referred to this site from the HP Notebook forums. The quick fix did a quick fix and speeded up a reboot from 10min plus to 4 min.
Regards GoergeSA
Not too bad
Fri, 2008-11-21 14:34 by admin
Thanks for reporting back. Good success, but 4 min is still not very fast. That's probably caused by something else though, perhaps too many programs and services to load. Or do the 4 min include a memory test? Then it would be OK.
Skipping Sound
Mon, 2008-10-27 17:37 by wfitzwater
I ran across this info and I am not quite as tech saavy as everyone on this post. I have also had a serious skipping problem with any sound since I purchased my machine 2 years ago. It started when using itunes or windows media for 15-20 minutes. I would then shut it down and open the application again and it would fix for a while. It has gotten worse though and now skips all the time. Additionally, any other sound on my computer ( such as AIM alerts) also sound sickly. I followed the instructions to ck to see if I have the PIO setting. I found through the device manager that I do not have a secondary IDE channel. However, when I open the primary ide channel it says that on device 0 transfer mode is "DMA if available" and current transfer mode is "PIO Mode." For device 1, it shows transfer mode of "PIO only" and current transfer mode of " PIO Mode." Does this mean I should run the quick fix and if so are there any possible problems that could occur as a result of the fix? Thank you for any help or input you can provide.
That's the typical case
Mon, 2008-10-27 17:57 by admin
Yes, just run the quick fix. It is harmless and easy to use.
If you're lucky, and most are, the problem will not recur for a long time, and if it does, run the quick fix again.
Thanks!
Tue, 2008-10-28 18:01 by wfitzwater
This worked like a charm! Thanks!
doesnt work
Mon, 2008-09-29 17:47 by msteel
the quick is not available i get a message saying it doesnt work!
Problem kept coming back
Thu, 2008-09-25 04:02 by dmcscorp
It turns out that rebooting my computer was temporarilly fixing the stuttering problem I was having. The actual culprit was mcshield.exe. That evil little program was hijacking 99% of my cpu on a steady cycle. I installed AVG Anti-virus free, uninstalled McAfee Antivirus (which worked fine for 2 years) and everything seems good again.
Seems to work great
Wed, 2008-09-24 17:38 by dmcscorp
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was at a complete loss for the past few days then I came across your site and I can now listen to music, watch my porn, browse and type without any problems. I was getting ready to scrap everything and start all over. If this lasts for the next few days I will definitely make a donation to the cause. You people rock!
Thanks for reporting
Wed, 2008-09-24 19:01 by admin
It's good to hear about successes. The problem is still at large, so this web site keeps being needed.
Re-enabling DMA
Fri, 2008-09-19 14:10 by john1951
Playing through my laptop's DVD/CD reader has been exhibiting exactly the symptoms that this help note addresses; that is stuttering on sound and vision on playing all dvds/cds, yet ripped and played from the hard drive or direct streaming worked fine. I have been homing in on the PIO/DMA issue described in the note for some time as it was the only analysis that seemed to make any sense, but the fix of uninstalling the secondary IDE channel didn't have any affect. However, I eventually spotted that device 1 on the primary IDE channel was stuck in PIO and ran the quick fix rather than the step by step approach. This solved the problem. Many thanks for the problem analysis and solution.
Thanks for reporting
Fri, 2008-09-19 19:32 by admin
Yes, the quick fix is very convenient and safe. It can also be repeated quickly, should the problem crop up again.
PIO to DMA - solution
Tue, 2008-09-02 17:18 by djuro bojic
People, I have tried a lot of stuff to fix it and the best solution was straight in front of my eyes!!!! Just uninstall drivers of the DVD/CD ROM device and reboot the computer. When it starts again it will install the drivers automatically and return to DMA mode by itself!!!!
I was so stupid, messing with Registry etc.
Yes, that works
Tue, 2008-09-02 17:44 by admin
As described in the article. But the easiest and quickest fix is still the little "Quick solution" program described at the top.
FINALLY fixed! Switch primary with secondary IDE cables!!
Fri, 2008-08-15 20:25 by ripples
Wow, after many hours I finally have a fix for my PIO-only Maxtor hard drive. I think this actually all started when I reformatted and installed Windows XP again. So I have been living with this chronically and just have gotten used to it.
Anyway, I tried everything--the vb code didn't allow me to boot up (expected since my HD was the only one), uninstalling the IDE drivers didn't work, updating drivers didn't do anything, trying to install the microsoft fixes didnt do anything, manually toggling from PIO to DMA if availble, etc etc etc.
The thing that finally worked was switching my hard drive from the primary IDE to the secondary IDE. (and my CDR and DVD which were on secondary now are on primary) After booting up this simple fix instantly corrected the problem and now I'm running at DMA 5. By the way, if people are looking for an easy way to check HD performance, there is a freeware program called "HD Tune" (search google) that works really well. It also can check for physical damage.
Anyway, thanks for the ideas here and hopefully if someone has a problem similar to mine they can try cable swapping and not go through that incredible hassle.
Check cables, etc.
Fri, 2008-08-15 22:16 by admin
Thanks for reporting back! Your solution, though perhaps working well, is not quite satisfactory, because it leaves the nagging question whether something may still be wrong with the primary IDE channel. It could be the cable or one of the plugs. It could be a wrong master-slave jumper position. It could be an improper sequence on the cable.
In theory the master device has to have the master-slave jumper plugged into the master position, and it has to be connected to the end connector of the data cable. A slave device, if present, has to have the master-slave jumper in the slave position and be connected to the middle connector on the cable.
But then I've seen all kinds of odd problems that were fixed by merely swapping something around. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if you put everything back to how it was before, and it would keep working just fine. (No guarantees though.) If you feel like it, you could try. If indeed it worked, I would suspect a poor contact that was fixed by the corrosion-cleaning friction of pulling and replugging the contacts.
But it could still be something else, and you could have found the best solution.
Thanks also for the HD Tune hint.
Another one saved...
Fri, 2008-08-15 18:08 by dugger
Another time your post saved a poor man looking for a solution!! In my case, everything started with a friend of mine telling me his windows xp has a crackling sound. I took a look at this pc, and found with Process Explorer that the Hardware Interrupts were taking a lot of CPU Kernel time, and everything was slowed down to pain. Reading a tons of web pages and forums, I found no solutions. I started haunting the device which driver would be the responsible of the interrupts cpu hard work, but with no luck. Fortunately I found your post, and checked immediately that the ATA primary device (the one with the OS disk on it!) was running in PIO mode!! A-ha! Found it!! And your quick solution, the vb script worked great way! Now everything is back ok!
Thank you very much. Your the right one!!
Thanks for reporting back
Fri, 2008-08-15 20:23 by admin
Thanks to everyone above and below for reporting the good things!
Yes, the VB script is a very quick solution. Should the problem reappear one day, you can quickly repeat the procedure.
thank you
Fri, 2008-08-01 02:49 by fuzzy monsters
thank you so much
this has been the bane of my existence for the past two weeks, the lag issues in photoshop CS3 have also been solved
thank you thank you
Big Thankyou!!!
Fri, 2008-07-18 17:20 by lxsed
Microsoft never ceases to amaze.... ;-(
Thank you for this clear and most helpful advice.
Details:
A week ago, experienced drastic system-wide slow-down, preceded by no out-of ordinary event.
Spent two days staright monitoring processes, scanning for viruses, spyware, defragmenting, cleaning-up, loosing sleep and tearing hair out in clumps - no results.
I have alredy decided to wipe the system and re-build from scratch, and would have done so, were I not to stumble across this article.
Primary IDE controller - Master disk with Boot partition(Win XP) - sure enough PIO!
Manually applied the registry changes.
Rebooted.
Back to UDMA-5!
Whatever the primary cause of the switch to PIO may have been..... .....surface scan of the Master disk passed OK, so I can sleep well again.
Alex
Trap still open
Fri, 2008-07-18 18:59 by admin
Yes, the trap is still wide open and catching victims in numbers that are hard to imagine. Glad you got out.
DMA falling back to PIO
Fri, 2008-07-11 09:06 by joe909001
I did this using the manual method. It worked a treat. Thanks very much. I can now keep the rest of my hair. What bit i've got. Thanks again.
Glad to hear
Fri, 2008-07-11 10:27 by admin
I keep wondering how many computer users never find out and just live with a crippled computer.
Resetting checksum fixed me - symptom was stuttering audio
Fri, 2008-07-11 02:18 by FredMay
My symptom was stuttering choppy audio and video on my laptop playing files located on my hard drive. The problem just appeared, although there was an unusual BSOD that had happened in the recent history. Reinstalled audio drivers, media player, motherboard drivers, removed unused programs, uninstalled Norton Anti-virus, re-loaded codecs, and much much more - all to no avail. Spent days of work. I did not want to send the laptop to the repair depot - for them to reformat my drive and reload Windows, which would have solved the problem. Then - I finally noticed that the disk was using PIO and wondered why it was not DMA. I was not sure at all which was better. My first Google search found this page. I found the registry count Checksum was high and reset it to zero. Next reboot, the drive automatically chose DMA, not PIO. The audio and video stutter was completely fixed!. Thank you kindly. I am now considering that there may still be a looming problem with the hard drive, and might be well advised to image a replacement drive. Thanks again!
Thanks for reporting!
Fri, 2008-07-11 07:18 by admin
Nice success story. Thanks!
Just observe the drive's behavior over time. If it keeps falling back to PIO, then there's something wrong. It may well be the drive, but it could also be the data cable connectors or the controller on the motherboard.
But maybe it behaves from now on and all is well.
WARNING for DeepFreeze users
Mon, 2008-06-30 02:25 by Spsp1981
A little of history first, I came to this thread while looking for possible causes/solutions to a sound playback problem. Whenever I tried to listen to music / watch a video, the system slowed down. Using Process Explorer, I found out that it was because of "Interrupts" (Hardware interrupts) taking up the CPU. When I read this post, seemed a good possible cause, I checked my devices properties and one of my hard disk was in PIO mode. So that, I tried the registry fix explained, but after rebooting my 3 hard disks and the DVD drive were detected as new hardware. Suddenly, after the last drive was installed, my display turned off (Power saving mode) and the system stopped responding. As this has happened to me before due to a problem with the nVidia VGA driver, I rebooted in VGA mode but a BAD_POOLER_[something] BSOD (some other messages also appeared, many of them didn't even mention a cause) prevented me from trying anything. Luckly Safe mode did work and after a serie of try and error tests, I find out that DeepFreeze was the problem. Seems that DeepFreeze does not consider the hard disk to be the same after redetection. So, after several research and tries and errors, I was able to make my PC work again and here I explain how:
Thanks
Mon, 2008-06-30 09:26 by admin
Thanks for this important information!
Installing questionable software, particularly software that intrudes deeply into the operating system, can cause serious, sometimes intractable problems.
Excellent
Thu, 2008-06-26 14:23 by macHelp
Clear
Concise
Accurate
If only all info was even half as good !
Thanks.
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You ! ! !
Thu, 2008-05-22 09:34 by greenylad
Have spent days trying to find out why my system was slow and any media playback was very stuttering and poor. used this to find that my primary IDE was in PIO, ran the simple script and hey presto, all is fine and it's back in DMA 5 ultra.
What a fatastic site.
Book marked for future and a small donation on it's way :-) :-)
Peter
You are the Mannn!
Sun, 2008-05-11 16:24 by amircoh28
Thank you so much. you helped me a lot.
You are awesome
Tue, 2008-04-22 02:05 by immortalsuby
I love you.
I spent hours upon hours, combined with months of a slow hard drive, trying to isolate and fix this problem. Your page told me exactly how to solve it and it worked great. DMA 5 again!
forgot to add...
Donation sent. Thanks again! :D
thank you so so much!!! i am
Sun, 2008-04-20 07:11 by soadserj
thank you so so much!!! i am so happy i can finally watch DVDs again!!! i sent you a little donation. i wish i could afford more, but you guys still are the best!
DMA is back!!!
Thu, 2008-04-10 03:04 by dc9driver
Nice little script!!! Did the trick perfectly. A little donation coming your way :)
Thanks.
LJ
Thank you all!
Thu, 2008-04-10 16:00 by admin
A little donation is, of course, always very welcome.
For those with the ALi M5229 IDE Controller
Sun, 2008-03-30 16:36 by Arran
I spent ages suffering with choppy sound playback within windows and it seemed to be due to hard drive activity.. I wasn't wrong, I tried an older smaller hard drive and it jumped straight in to dma mode.. My new 160gb drive was stuck in pio (pio has high cpu usage which was resulting in my chopping sounds)... So I did a search and found this site... Helped me out loads...
Anyway mine was due to the chipset as said above in the quotation... I managed to hunt down these VERY rare drivers....
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/a7a266/IDE4008.exe
If you're concerned about downloading a random file from some randomer then here is all the details...
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/a7a266/
I believe this will sort the problem for those with the ALi M5229 IDE Controller... Doesnt matter what brand of computer you have.
Thanks
worked like a charm
Sat, 2009-01-03 05:06 by goldflowerinc
The IDE4008.exe driver installation program mentioned above worked for me, as I have an ALi M5229 IDE controller on my HP laptop. It can't hurt to try the vbs file mentioned at the beginning, as I did this as well. But since I had done the registry editing manually to no avail prior to finding this driver, I think that the new driver is what fixed it. So many reboots! Even once I installed this driver, I had to reboot twice (once per channel) for the driver to finish "installing new hardware" but already after the first reboot I noticed (and heard) the speedup (no stuttering Windows intro sound). Now my hard drive is no longer the bottleneck. I have a HP Pavilion ze5600 with the ALi M5229 IDE Controller and a Hitachi hard drive. Thanks so much to all who posted!!! - Charles
ALI M5229 responsible for DMA failing to PIO for Samsung drive
Sun, 2008-05-11 15:10 by GigiDuru
I newly bought a Samsung 160GB drive on an old system as a secondary drive. It failed from the very beginning to PIO, with the following errors shown in system log (event viewer):
Event Type: Error
Event Source: atapi
Event Category: None
Event ID: 9
Date: 5/11/2008
Time: 5:02:49 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SUNSHINE
Description:
The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period.
And yes, Arran, you were right.
I first tried the registry modifications, but it did not work. Of course, all the HW testing was tried as well (moving/changing between IDE cables, and so on...).
This (http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/a7a266/IDE4008.exe) did the trick. It is a rare drive, indeed :)
THanks a lot!
Bye,
Gigi
ALi/ULi unified driver 2.20 (ALiIDE version 1.51) also works
Tue, 2008-12-02 22:18 by avbohemen
Thanks to this site I found the solution to a 4 year old problem on my brother's laptop. It also has an ALi M5229 controller and it was running in PIO mode on a Seagate ST94011A harddisk.
I decided to go with the latest ALi driver I could find. It's now on the NVidia site, after they had taken over ALi/ULi, here: http://www.nvidia.com/page/uli_drivers.html The SCSI emulating driver has been a workaround since UDMA became popular and Microsoft and other vendors had no well-working IDE/ATAPI drivers. That got solved slowly but surely after a while, so now I just wanted to use the ATAPI driver. I can imagine though, that the IDE 4.0.0.8 driver above is a last resort for devices that absolutely won't work in UDMA mode.
After the driver update I used the resetdma.vbs script, and it worked fabulously! The disk is now on UDMA mode 5, instead of PIO. Strangly enough, the DVD burner in the laptop has always been working at UDMA mode 2...
Thanks a lot for these finds
Sun, 2008-03-30 18:25 by admin
This is very useful information for users with this controller chip.
THANK YOU!!! :D
Mon, 2008-03-24 19:28 by WilhelmR
THANK YOU!!! :D