Enabling/ Checking DMA In Windows XP/ 2000

The first thing to do is to right click on “My Computer”. You can use the icon in the Start Menu or the one on the Desktop. Once you have right clicked on it then choose “Properties”.


The next thing to do is to click the “Hardware” tab at the top of the screen. From here you need to hit the “Device Manager” button.


Under device manager you need to find your hard drives. These are normally found under “IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers”. Under this you will have a number of items. The ones that we are interested in are the ones with channel in their name. You will need to do the same to all of the ones with channel in their name. To bring up the next window you will need to double click on the item. We will take Primary IDE Channel first.


This is the screen that will come up. Device 0 is the primary device on the channel and Device 1 is the slave device. In the “Transfer Mode” box you should be seeing “DMA If Available”. If not and you are seeing “PIO Only” then you need to click on the box and change this to “DMA If Available”.


To finished simply click the “OK” button to exit the windows. You will now need to check your “Secondary IDE Channel”.


Now you will have to reset your computer for the changes to take effect.


If when you have restarted the computer one of the channels is back on PIO-Only mode the last thing you can try is to uninstall the channel from the Device Manager window. When you then restart the computer it will force windows to reinstall the drivers and hopefully use the DMA if available mode.


(Added note: DO NOT delete the IDE channel if your hard drive containing Windows is also on that channel! An alternative to deleting the channel can be found in this thread. -C64K)