Can I use DMA mode?

Hi all,
I was burning a disk with some new burning software and it told me that DMA mode was not enabled on my machine. I was simply going to change it in device manager and got a window pop up that says " "UNSUPPORTED HARDWARE ALERT - changing this setting may have undesirable effects with your hardware. Contact your hardware vendor to ensure that this setting is supported ".

Is this just a "generic" warning, or does it mean that I SHOULDN'T change to DMA???

I have a Maxtor HD, during bootup I see that it is in Ultra DMA mode.

Any suggestions?

 

I would go ahead and turn on DMA. If it does cause problems with your hardware you should be able to turn it off. As I'm guessing you already know or you wouldn't have gotten the message... turn DMA on and off under primary and secondary IDE, not the drives themselves.

The warning itsself is pretty generic. It's just telling you it's a big change.

 

Hi Jay,
Thanks for the reply. I don't have the option of turning on DMA under primary and secondary drives, there's no check box for it - only under "disk drives ". Does that make a difference?

 

Ahhhhhhhhhh, what version of windows? I run 2000 and DMA is under IDE, not the drives on mine. May very well be under the drives in XP.

 

Jay,
Actually.....it's Win98 SE....yeah, I know...I really SHOULD move into the new millineum one of these years!

 

To be honest I'd run 98 before XP. I have XP sitting in a jewel case. Was on my system but I scrapped it and went back to 2000. Don't have to yell at me XP users... I suppose it's great but I just don't personally like it.

 

In the Device Manager, you need to look under CDROM, and enable DMA for each CD drive, then go to Disk Drives and enable DMA there.
Then go into Hard Disk Controller, go into the "PCI Bus Master IDE Controller" (it will have more to the name), then under the Settings tab, change the "Default" to "Both IDE Channels Enabled ".
Reboot when prompted after exiting Device Manager.
If DMA is not supported by your system, the checkmarks for DMA will have disappeared after the reboot.
If they stay, overall system performance will be improved. The difference is that instead of going through your processor to access the drives, it will be a Direct Memory Access.
That is a generic warning, BTW.

 

Hi Mark,
Thanks for the instructions! I followed them to the letter while I was changing those settings...and I gotta tell you...there were some SCARY moments in there when things wouldn't work and had to boot into safe mode a couple of times! When I went into SAFE MODE the first time, I was going to just change the settings back - UNCHECK DMA mode - because it jst didn't seem to be going smoothly. BUT, I persevered and went on (I'm a sucker for punishment!) and it's working FINE now. There IS a noticible difference running in DMA mode...happy I decided to keep going!

Again, thanks to you both for the input!!!

Cheers!

 

Tom, as soon as I read your post, I thought this sounds like a Windows 98 problem. I actually remember dealing with the exact same issue years ago.

But with XP, my biggest problem is deciding on what new background I want to use when I tire of the old one. At some point, eventually you'll want to upgrade. XP is for the most part troublefree - IMHO.

Gary