ice_glitch

I originally placed this in Removeable drives section, but as my problem also deals with IDE/ATA controllers, I've placed it here also so it doesn't get excluded or unanswered (like my question in removeable drives has so far). I've been having trouble with my DVD+R drive being stuck in PIO Mode. I Ran a drive read speed test on it and have been getting about 1.5mb/s as opposed to the common 25mb/s range. I've been through uninstalling and reinstalling my IDE Drives, swapping ribbon cables, deleting registry keys for data checksums and changing registry device mode settings, as well as changing jumper settings on the drive, but to no avail, my DVD+R still runs in PIO Mode while using the setting "Use DMA If Available". SO... here's my setup, and maybe this will help where all other help has failed. I have my 40-pin IDE cable coming out of my motherboard, connecting to my DVD+R in the middle (jumper set to cable select according to Dimension 4700 user manual), and my C Drive lastly (set to Master on jumper). Then I have an additional Hard Drive (set to slave) running off an 7-pin ATA cable (I think that's what it is) straight from the motherboard all by its lonesome (cable wise). Now here's the part I don't get: When I run Device Manager and go to my IDE Channels, there are two Primary IDE Channels. The first Primary IDE Channel reports only one drive on it; Drive C (set as master) is Device 0. The second Primary IDE Channel reports two drives; the Drive 0 as my slave drive (the lonesome SATA drive) and Drive 1 as my DVD+R running PIO mode with (DMA if available). As I said earlier, I've been deleting my slave data checksums in registry and setting the slave speed to run at 0xFFFFFFFF but every time I save it and restart my computer, the registry reverts to the way it was before, with the same DataChecksums and TimingModeAllowed settings. The registry just seems to go back to the way it was before I changed the settings on the IDE controllers. Any expert help would be much appreciated. I hope someone in this forum knows something about all these weird terms I just mentioned. Thanks in advance...

2pistolpacker

Hi ice_glitch, I would first jumper the dvd drive as a slave not CS. Secondly if the 2 hard drives are on seperate cables, they should both be jumpered as masters. Try this and post back. Mike

ice_glitch

Ok, I jumpered both hard drives as masters, and the DVD drive to slave. I uninstalled the IDE controllers and restarted my computer thinking it would redetect the new settings. Still no change. C:/ master is at UDMA 5 as previous, DVD drive E:/ is in PIO Mode, and the slave hard drive by itself D:/ is in UDMA 2. Even after I uninstall the IDE controllers and everything, the UDMA modes stay the same on the hard drives, and the DVD is still in PIO mode. Why would my registry still revert to the same settings even after re-install? Is there a BIOS setting I'm not aware of?

ice_glitch

Got a little update on this. BIOS does not detect my DVD drive at all. I tried clearing the NVRAM to redetect my hardware settings and it still does not detect. Also, my Dell Dimension A10 BIOS does not support the Auto detect feature. DVD continues to work fine though, just in PIO mode.