notarkard

I've had this HD for a while, and it's reverted back to PIO mode a couple of times in the past. All I've had to do in the past was uninstall the Secondary IDE Channel and restart.

Recently, my HD reverted back to PIO mode, so I tried to do what I normally do in that case. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Upon doing some more reading in these forums and some others, I have:

1. Run a Visual Basic script that edits the registry. - Did nothing
2. Edited the registry myself. - Did nothing
3. Run a chkdsk /r. - Did nothing
4. Did a system restore. - Did nothing.

Every time I uninstall the Secondary IDE channel and restart, it does go back to UDMA-5, but after some use will start going down to UDMA3, 2, 1, and eventually back to PIO. The process can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 8 hours of use. As you can imagine, it's very annoying when I have to uninstall the Secondary IDE channel every day just to be able to use the computer for a couple of hours. Not to mention, if it reverts to PIO mode, everything starts crawling and I'm at risk for the computer freezing and losing whatever I was working on at the time.

I've looked through my Event Viewer and there are a ton of Event ID 11 and 5 errors from "disk" and "atapi" respectively. Could this mean the hard drive itself is failing? It still works as far as data storage goes, and everything runs perfect until it gets switched back to PIO mode.

My HD model is a ST3160023A. My question is this: Is it possible to just force the drive into DMA mode? Not even give it the option to ever revert back to PIO? I know if there are enough drive errors, WinXP will do me the "favour" of switching to PIO, but I don't want it to do that. Can I just force the drive into permanent DMA mode?

I've been using Windows XP and now WinXP x64, basically since they both came out, so I know very little about Vista. Does Vista also perform this "favour" after several read errors? Would installing Vista force my drive into DMA mode forever?

Thanks for your time in responding.