WinXP forcing PIO - anyway to disable this?
Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2004 10:04 pmA while ago I got a cheapo "Emprex" (rebranded BTC) DVDR drive for my G/F's PC.
Its been workin fine for months, but is recently running into a stupid problem. Its never burnt a single coaster, that is until win XP forced it into PIO mode. When this happens burns make it to 22% and then crap out.
A quick google search came up with this:
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm which then linked to M$, http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tec ... E-DMA.mspx
The important things these pages mention is
And
After doing a few tests I have found this to be exactly the case. I have 3 funky kind of scratched, hard to read DVD's. If I insert any of these DVDs to the drive it will spin for awhile, get forced into PIO mode, and then still not open the DVD's. I don’t think anything is actually wrong with the drive, its just a little finicky. These discs do work in other drives, but it takes them a while to load up.
Removing the secondary ide channel from device manager and then rebooting puts the drive back into UDMA mode.
What Im wondering is, how can this be prevented? Basically, whenever an unreadable DVD is inserted, the drive is kicked to PIO mode and then will create coasters if a burn is attempted. Is it just me, or should winXP simply say the disc is unreadable, and not mess with PIO/UDMA mode?
Thanks for any feedback.
Its been workin fine for months, but is recently running into a stupid problem. Its never burnt a single coaster, that is until win XP forced it into PIO mode. When this happens burns make it to 22% and then crap out.
A quick google search came up with this:
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm which then linked to M$, http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tec ... E-DMA.mspx
The important things these pages mention is
For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.
And
In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device
After doing a few tests I have found this to be exactly the case. I have 3 funky kind of scratched, hard to read DVD's. If I insert any of these DVDs to the drive it will spin for awhile, get forced into PIO mode, and then still not open the DVD's. I don’t think anything is actually wrong with the drive, its just a little finicky. These discs do work in other drives, but it takes them a while to load up.
Removing the secondary ide channel from device manager and then rebooting puts the drive back into UDMA mode.
What Im wondering is, how can this be prevented? Basically, whenever an unreadable DVD is inserted, the drive is kicked to PIO mode and then will create coasters if a burn is attempted. Is it just me, or should winXP simply say the disc is unreadable, and not mess with PIO/UDMA mode?
Thanks for any feedback.