DJBeSSeR

It only gets worse.....lately since the return to normal celeron 2.4ghz speeds, the hard drives are extremely slow, to the point that windows takes a LONG time to boot, i'm suspecting hardware damage or maybe something with the partition headers? these are all guesses but i'm just frustrated with the whole situation, especially since i have a good computer background, ah well, i guess i'll keep reading.....seems either something mobo related or maybe the hdd's are just dying, they are sitting very close to each other and the heat might be a bit much. when i returned home the other night it was a black screen and just said "press any key to reboot" that's it....no windows, nuthin.....but after scandisks and other checking software, all is fine, still in pio mode. i've since pulled all ide and put the C drive only on the 2nd ide channel by it self, seems to work ok....i'll figure this out somehow. DJB

intel chipset.

Glad someone answered, because i'm experienceing the same trouble. ASUS P4B533 board, using correct cables , ALL DRIVES, incl dvd burner stuck in PIO mode. At first sp2 was to solve the issue as i read on a MS page, but that did jack all. I tried a fix from another page, registry to delete the ide cache data for the ide channels, btw my ide 0000 is my ultra bus something, then i have pri and 2nd listed in device mgr, winxp pro btw. I will give this a try REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000] "EnableUDMA66"=dword:00000000 "EnableUDMA100"=dword:00000001 as you suggested, hopefully it will work, this is a very advanced problem and i've made many poor decisions in my attempt to fix, I tried uninstalling the ultra dma and also pri and 2nd channels (ide) from device manager and of course then i'm doing a windows repair install, lots of fun. then i made another error, so i did another repair install this morning. bios has been fully updated, and checked to see that dma modes are auto detected. also downloaded western digital drive tools to check the SMART on the drives (c pri is 40 gb and d is 60 gb) MY SYSTEM WAS/HAS been overclocked.....2.4 ghz celeron to 3ghz after all this fuss of troubleshooting i now suspect i might have actually damaged something which is limiting my drive speeds, possibly the bus? or chipset? is that possible? any help appreciated and I will monitor this thread so i can reply should anyone require more details. after dumping the registry cached ide data for pri and secondary master and slave, on reboot, the drives still come up as PIO mode, but are preferenced at "DMA if available" horribly upsetting especially if my overclocking messed this. hard drives are master slaved and the dvd burner is on it's own channel. when i think about the last time the drives were working fine in dma mode, it definitely was before the overclock and even after but i cannot confirm that, i just hope i didn't ruin my hardware, i'm putting my money on some silly config setting i missed in the bios and/or microsoft sucking. thanks again.

Is your system overclocked? DJB