pane00

I have an Afreey 52x CDROM and every now and again it will change it back to PIO mode. Even though it's UDMA 33.

What mobo and chipset do you have?

Quote: Oh it certainly is true for Intel IDE controllers and has been since the days of the I815 chipset. Any combination of device can be added to said controller and each device will run at it's maximum transfer rate. As I said above, this is true for all Intel IDE controllers since the 815 chipset. I cannot comment on VIA, SIS, Promise, Highpoint etc as they don't list such a feature in the specifications - but I would be very surprised if they didn't do something similar. I have a via chipset. I've heard so many conflicting stories that I just do it to be safe. I'm not going to benchmark to make sure. It's not worth it me. On the fly copies of cd's are the only reason I can see to have your optical drives on different channels. I personally don't like (the on the fly) process anyway. But hey, I was just trying to help he can do what ever he wants

Quote: That's only true on older IDE controllers. If you use an ATA 66 Cable or above, both drives will transfer at their highest speeds I've heard that too. I've also have been told that isn't true and on the show ScreenSavers on TechTV the say that even with a ATA 133 contoller card put optical drives on their own channel. So what's wrong with playing it save and doing it anyway? It can't hurt.

If I understand your post correctly you have cdrom's on the same IDE channel as a HD's. That's a no-no. The fastest CDrom or DVD player in the world is going to always be slower than a hard drive. IDE channels will transfer data at the same speed as the slowest device on that channel. Put your optical drives on the 2nd and Hard drives on the first or primary. Now to your problem. Befor you do what I stated above. Try this, Go to device manager and right click the problem items and uninstall them. It should ask if you want to reboot check no. Three item's down in the device manager are IDE ATA/Atapi controllers uninstall the first and second the same way you did the DVD/CDrom drives. Then reboot. Then I would shut down your PC and put the all the hard drives on First channel and optical drives on second. Remember put the harddrive that is your OS as MASTER. You should get a performance increase if you do that. Start up your PC and the check the Bios and make sure that it detects it properly (I've built many different PC's for friends and sometimes forget to jumper the devices properly, always in haste.) When you get into Windows let it redetect and it will install the things you uninstalled and it should ask you to reboot again, Do so. Then when Windows starts up again check the device manager and everything should be ok. Also, when your in the device manager make sure everything is in DMA mode (open up the IDE ATA/ATAPI contollers and click on Primary IDE channel and in advanced settings transfer mode: DMA if availble should be highlighted on the pull down list. Do the same on the secondary IDE channel. Hope this helps and let me know how it went.

Well I've had some weird happenings with Sp3. First I coulndn't download Win updates anymore. After I fixed that issue I delved into my favorite game Madden 2002. I went insane for days trying to figure out why my MS sidewinder gamepad [old gameport version]. Would stop working in Madden 2002 after a while. Luckily I run a 98SE dual boot and tried Madden on that OS and it worked fine. I had just installed the newest SB Live drivers and thought it was that. To my suprise for some reason SP3 causes it. Go figure that one. Had to uninstall SP3 and everything is fine. I had no other problems with SP3. I wonder if disabling power managment and SP3 causes this? I just hate the way Win 2k uses IRQ's. Apparently from what my brother's XP machine does is much smarter. It let's him have all his devices on one IRQ even with it handling power managment. Might force me to upgrade.

I had the same problem and this fixed it. I had a fresh install and just installed SP3. Then went to update windows and it wouldn't download it. I had to uninstall SP3. Download the Windows trust certify thingy and checked always trust microsoft. That always bothered me trust Microsoft [HA]! Then I downloaded a small file just to be sure it worked and reinstalled SP3. Went back to Win update and downloaded all the updates left. Hope it helps. Did all this before I realized SP3 screws up my MS sidewinder gamepad in Madden 2002. Works fine in the control panel but stops working in the middle of game. Tried different sound drivers, nothing worked except uninstalling SP3.