DMA and DVD

[Guest]

Ok, here's the situation. We just got a DVD drive and it runs a little choppy. We have 256MB of RAM, an 800mhz Athlon, and a 64MB DDR Radeon video card, so I don't think its our system. Which leads me to think maybe it's because DMA isn't enabled. Which leads me to my question, how do I enable it? When we first got our CD-RW (we also have a CD-ROM, yes 3 drives, and our 45GB hard drive is partitioned into C and D) it told me to enable DMA and when I did it, it screwed up the computer. The mother board didn't support DMA, so it stoped recognizing the drive. Anyway, we got a new mother board now and I sent an email to the company asking if it suppored DMA and if so how to enable it. He said it did and that to enable it on the DVD drive I had to connect it to the hard drive. I asked what the hell he was talking about and he said that I had to daisy chain them together with the IDE cable and hook them to the hard drive that way. If that's so, how do I enable it for the hard drive and CD-RW as well? And do I have to do anything special to enable it on a partitioned drive? Most of all, should I even do it at all? Any help would be nice.

 

[Guest]

To arioch699,
I don't think it's as complicated as you've been told.
To enable DMA for a device ie your DVD drive in Windows just go into the control panel, select system, select device manager, select the DVD drive (you may have to expand on the CD drive icon) then select properties then select the settings tab. You should see a box marked DMA just click on it to enable DMA. Windows may give you some warnings about enabling DMA but you can ignore them. You will probably have to restart windows for the setting to change. To check it worked- after boot up go back into the menu again and the DMA box should still be ticked.
You should enable DMA in all your hard drives, CD's etc to improve performance.
If you can't enable DMA it may be because the device or motherboard is not DMA capable (Your DVD drive is almost certainly capaable of DMA) or because you have some settings in the bios that need changing (we can try that later if required).
You may find that DMA is already enabled on your drive as quite often when you install DVD player software it will automatically enable DMA. If DMA is already enabled you problems may be elsewhere- again we can work through those later if required.
Hope this works for you
nowherecity

If I'm not here and I'm not there then I must be nowhere_city

 

[Guest]

If the motherboard recognizes the drives in DMA or UDMA mode, you just have to enable it in Win9X/ME as mentioned above. You don't have to daisy chain it or anything like that. And yes if you can, I would do it.

***check the jumpers 1st then check em again***

 

[Toejam31]

"and he said that I had to daisy chain them together with the IDE cable and hook them to the hard drive that way."

That's crazy. The guy is an idiot! Follow the advice above.

I just had to comment. Where do companies get help desk techs these days ... McDonald's? Jeez.

(Fat Burger is exempt from this comment, of course.) <GRIN>

Toejam31

<font color=purple>My Rig:</font color=purple> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847</A>

 

[Guest]

Hey, I used to work and McDonalds and I think I know more than that tech buy. He works for Soyo and his name is Hasim Arshfar, so I think maybe something was lost in the translation. Thanks for the help guys. I thought that's all it was, but that tech dude confused the hell out of me so I figured I should make sure first.

 

[dmcmahon]

The advice re. the DMA flag in the device manager is good. Here are two more tips:

1. If you have a UDMA-capable drive, you can use an 80-conductor UDMA cable. That's probably what the tech was thinking when he told you to chain it to the hard drive, since the hard drive probably is connected with a UDMA cable. It doesn't matter, of course, you can just put another UDMA cable on the second IDE channel.

2. Under the "performance options" section, find the settings for CD drives and set it to "optimize for quad speed or higher". This made a huge difference on my system.