I have discovered my whole problem with burning is the DMA. No matter what I do WinXP resets it to PIO while reading the disk.

I've done this reg hack;

Go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEMS\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
The Default Value should be "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
Go to "0001" key if your device is on Primary IDE Chanel or "0002" if your device is on Secondary IDE channel
and change the MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed or SlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed to 0xffffffff depending if your device is master or slave

And it still resets. I have no idea why it has started to do this.

Anyone have the permanent fix ? I've read untill I'm blue in tha face and it seems one must contact Microsoft for a fix ?? If someone has the fix would you be so kind to share it ...

teecee ...

i have had this issue ... took me forever to figure it out ...but this is what i had to do ...

in bios set your bios to optimize values ...

then I booted and checked all my drives ...if they was not set then i would shut down and unhook each drive and hook one by one and check it ..also if you use cable select windows switched it back whenever it wanted .... so set them according to the cable ... yes set the jumpers to master or slave ....

i had to hook all mine up one by one and then it was fixed ..


also on buddy he was having this issue and he just unistalled the atapi main controlller. ... and then did all that ... mentioned above and it put back to ultra dma 2....

trust me it worked on four machines ...hell took us awhile to figure it all out lol ..


what problem did you have in burning ???

You can also try this utility from Dell called PIOtoDMA.exe

Release Title: Utility to set Secondary IDE controller CD devices to DMA mode.

Release Date: 12/20/2002

Description: This utility can be used to set secondary IDE CD-ROM devices back to a UDMA mode after the Operating System (WindowsXP) has set the device to PIO mode.

hey Future

u have any documentation with that ? was wonder you just do it once or if it changes run that exe ? just was wondering ... just run once and never again or what ? ran it on another machine I have and it changed it ..so was curious and i take it only works on stuff on second IDE and not first correct with that little description


thanks for the little utility

Thanks for the info guys,

I'll try all of it if needed. I have my burners as masters on primary and secondary. HDD on the raid IDE cables.

Had the Lite-ON on secondary master and the Plex on first. Swaped them and the Lite-On still changes to PIO every read with BlideWrite. I burned an a CloneCD image last night with the Plex and it stayed on DMA. Have to try a read with it and see if it is a problem just with the Lite-ON, doupt it.

I've uninstalled the drives, uninstalled the IDE .. everything that has to do with anything and the burners. Updated VIA, rolled back the VIA ... everything but unhook them and reboot. Will try that and reinstall one at a time.

Thanks again, Every burn ends in a coaster with those rings as I showed in another thread. I have only one good burn with BW5 and now I even get bad burns with 4.2.5. & 4.5.7.

Did all the above, the Lite-On reset after reading to PIO mode with BW5. I then read the same disk with the Plex and it stayed on Ultra DMA 2 settings. Problem with Lite-ONs ???

I'm going to reflash the drive and see what that will do.

Tried this ... at first look it looked good. Read a disk and stoped it before the Topology and it still showed DMA. Before it switched before that point. So I tried and read and burnt a disk and the copy is no good as well thr burner was set back to PIO mode.

I smell a reformat coming.