Topic: Secondary IDE stuck in PIO mode

[kskreider]

I've got a problem.  My secondary IDE which has my Toshiba DVD player and my Plextor 12x CDRW won't switch the DMA on for the Plextor, but will for the DVD player.  I can switch it to "DMA if Available", but it stays stuck in PIO mode.  I am getting a horrendous # of prevented underruns (like 250 per burn) 

Here has what I have tried so far and nothing has worked:

Strike 1: I tried to swap master for slave and all that did was swap the DMA to Drive 0, or vice versa.  (basically which ever the DVD player is on)

Strike 2: I swapped spots on my cable, and yes the Plextor DMA'd fine on the same friggin cable before.

Strike 3: I tried to uninstall the Secondary IDE driver, which removed the Via 4in1 pack from MSI and loaded in the windows default.

Strike 4: I tried to uninstall the Via Bus Controller driver, which removed the Via 4in1 pack from MSI and loaded in the windows default.

Strike 5: I tried to change my BIOS settings so that the Plextor was "disabled" to prevent autodetection

Strike 6: I emailed Plextor, who told me to email MSI, so I emailed MSI and got no reply...yet

Motherboard is a MSI MS-6309 (old).

Anyone with any other ideas, I am all ears.  Anyone know of particular types of software that might cause DMA conflicts?  New Nero?  Alcohol 120%?, etc.

...Kk

[MattD]

Ouch ... this DMA thing is an issue I had with having 2 drives (DVD and CD) on the same IDE channel - 1 master, 1 slave. I tried all of what you did - I know that 4in1 driver bullshit well. My motherboard is also an MSI (6320??).

Not to disappoint you, but I never solved it. The "solution" was to get a PCI expansion IDE controller card and use that for one of the channels. That way they're both masters and both have DMA enabled. Shitty solution if you ask me, but I haven't had a problem since. This was in college, and I actually made a matrix of every possible hardware config that would be acceptable and the PCI expansion card is the only one that I tried that worked. I suppose you could also put one of your harddrives in a FW/USB case and use the port that frees up, but I didn't get to that point and those were expensive back then.