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Nforce2 IDE drivers DMA, PIO

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drshivas

Sith Lord
Joined
Jun 17, 2003
Location
Maryland, USA
I am putting this thread here because it might be just a general Nforce2 issue, not particularly related to my mobo:

I have a Shuttle AN35N Ultra (NF2) running WinXP Pro SP1, with a DVD-ROM drive that is stuck in PIO only mode. When I install Nvidia's latest NF2 drivers, I all of a sudden get the option to view the modes (DMA, PIO) for the IDE controller in the device manager. (This shows me that the drive is stuck in PIO.) That option wasn't there with the original Shuttle drivers... any ideas?

Now, the way I sorta got around this was by disabling the primary slave in the BIOS and allowing windows to autodetect it, making it DMA. (what I am getting at is the DVD-ROM isn't ripping at speeds higher than 2x, where my other machine Epox 8rda+ with DVD, same OS and service pack, can rip up to 10x- and it is auto DMA). I tested a rip and this did push my speeds higher than 2X.

Unfortunately, this made my BURNER, which was working fine, a mess. It was burning at .01X, and then threw IO errors writing from the HDD, not the DVD-ROM.

I reverted back to the older drivers and things are back to the way they were before.

Should I give the morpheus/nemisis drivers a try? any other recs?

Thanks
 
I think this is more of an XP issue than anything. I've had the same thing happen to my DVDROM drive using an 8K3A+ (KT333). It seemed slow, and I'd read of others having problems with it ending up in PIO (Programmed Input Output mode) rather than DMA. DMA is much faster, because it bypasses the CPU, and communicates with the system memory directly.

The standard fix is to uninstall the IDE controller that the drive is attached to, reboot, and let it autodetect and reinstall. That worked for me.
 
Thanks repo man11.

I also discovered that having a PCI video card on an nForce2 board can cause issues as well, specifically if you install the nForce2 drivers with an AGP card then put in a PCI card- or something to that effect. I have a Voodoo3 3000 PCI in there currently (YIKES!)

I need get another AGP card (too many old cards laying around!) and then tackle the stuck PIO mode thing with after the video is ironed out.
 
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