What's The Bottleneck On This Older Rig?

[3 of 7]

Originally Posted by Dave Simpson

There are two HDDs in this box. Drive C is for XP and apps, drive D has everything else, including RAR files and ISOs. Which one to uninstall? Or is it both? And will they really be safely re-installed upon re-boot? I'm pretty hesitant to do this to somebody else's PC.

Thanks!

You don't want to uninstall the hard drive, rather the ide primary controller

I've heard varying results of manually setting it to PIO reboot and manually set it to DMA, but I've always uninstalled it and rebooted.

It will default to PIO if there are over 6 UDMA errors in a given time ( I may have the term wrong there, I'm sure someone will jump in and help out if so) Make sure to check the ribbon cable and make sure it's an 80 wire and not the 40 wire.

[Dave Simpson]

Grinder,

Per the original invoice, mobo is "Asus P4S800-MX, socket 478, SIS661FX 800FSB, DDR, VGA, ATA133". I assume the "sis" listed here is what you're referring to.

3 of 7,

Thanks for the info, I'll give it a crack. After re-booting, will XP set it to DMA?

DS.

[Dave Simpson]

Uninstalled, re-booted, XP re-installed. Settings are the same as they previously were. Ugh!

DS.

[3 of 7]

is it a 40 wire ribbon cable? Sometimes the cable can cause this.

[Dave Simpson]

I'll have to open it up to check. I'm checking the IDE HDD ribbon cable, right?

DS.

[3 of 7]

yuppers. It wouldn't hurt to check the date on the drive as well, it may be erroring out.

[grinder]

a checkdisk on the drive will show if it's erroring out, but the OS is not hanging so i dont think that would be the issue.

The ribbon cable is an excellent thing to check!!! The wires on the ribbon cable should be FINER than the floppy drive ribbon cable. If they look about the same thickness then you need to change the cables.

It is also a good idea to make sure you have the latest IDE driver from the SiS web site (or latest chipset drivers from Asus will do as well).

[Dave Simpson]

Great thanks to you dudes! After opening the box, I could see that the two IDE HDDs were indeed connected to an 80-pin cable. Figuring I had little to lose, I swapped the connections to the mobo of the HDDs and disc drives. Although I'm pretty sure the mobo manual indicates that the HDDs are now connected to the secondary IDE connector (slot? channel?), the PC now extracts a RARed ISO in about 4 minutes, and burns the ISO at 4x in 15 minutes. Exactly what I was after.

Current Primary IDE channel settings: Device 0, Transfer Mode: DMA if available, Current Transfer Mode: Ultra DMA Mode 4
Device 1, Transfer Mode: DMA if available, Current Transfer Mode: PIO Mode

Current Secondary IDE channel settings: Device 0, Transfer Mode: DMA if available, Current Transfer Mode: Ultra DMA 5
Device 1, Transfer Mode: DMA if available, Current Transfer Mode: Ultra DMA 5

Thanks again for all your help. Cheers!

DS.

[JimboToronto]

Originally Posted by Dave Simpson

There are two HDDs in this box. Drive C is for XP and apps, drive D has everything else, including RAR files and ISOs. Which one to uninstall? Or is it both? And will they really be safely re-installed upon re-boot? I'm pretty hesitant to do this to somebody else's PC.

Thanks!

To reset DMA, you don't uninstall the drives themselves, you uninstall the controllers.

Perhaps this guide would help.

Enable DMA mode in Windows XP

Don't worry, at worst it'll simply revert to PIO.