Not again! Yes, DMA problems...

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Sun Feb 17, 2002 1:04 pm

Yes, it's another one of those DMA questions! Problem is, I had to do a complete reinstall of my system and something must have changed in the settings that causes me this problem: If I enable the dma checkbox for my HD, the HD goes "CRASH!" when I try to read and write (ie. play a song in Cubase and record it at the same time). Overall general performance also seems to go down, with cursors getting stuck for a few seconds after certain operations.
My system details are as follows:

Pentium 3 1000 Mhz
Asus CUSL2-C mobo
Maxtor Ultra ATA66 15 GB IDE disk 7200rpm(primary master)
creamware Pulsar soundcard
256 MB RAM
Windows 98SE

I'm using the Standard dual PCI IDE controller. The HD shows up as Generic IDE Disk type 47.

I know it worked before but can't seem to get it to work again!
I'm not a wizard with computers but I really can't see anything that would cause my HD to react like this on enabling DMA. Maxtors seem to be used regularly by people on this forum, as is the CUSL-2C. Anyone have a clue? Should I use a different HD controller?

alfonso · Post by **alfonso** » Sun Feb 17, 2002 2:57 pm

did you reinstall also the intel 815ep drivers that come with the mobo?

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Sun Feb 17, 2002 3:00 pm

Might be a dumb question, but have you installed the intel drivers for the cusl2-c?

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Sun Feb 17, 2002 4:07 pm

Yes I patched all the drivers using the setup from the mobo cd-rom.

remixme · Post by **remixme** » Sun Feb 17, 2002 4:20 pm

This is a long shot.
Have you changed anything inside your computer, I've known a faulty ide cable or a non ATA66 cable cause this behaviour. But since you say your not a wizz with computers this your unlikely to have changed anything.

The other possibility; are any IRQ's being shared with the ide controller?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: remixme on 2002-02-17 16:22 ]</font>

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Sun Feb 17, 2002 5:06 pm

No irq's shared, but I'm going to try another cable, see if that helps.
Thanks for the replies.

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Mon Feb 18, 2002 9:25 am

It's not your cables it is 100% sure your IDE drivers. WinME's default i815 IDE driver (Microsoft IDE) gives great performance, and the newer Intel drivers are okay (called Intel Application Accelerator). I just use WinME with Microsoft's IDE driver usually, and that works fine.

Here, again, is the i815 driver installation order. You must follow this closely if you're installing a really old version of windows like 98SE or Win2K.
http://support.intel.com/support/mother ... ffirst.htm

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: subhuman on 2002-02-18 09:26 ]</font>

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Mon Feb 18, 2002 12:43 pm

It seems it actually WAS the cable that was faulty. I replaced it today and now everything seems to run normally with dma checked. I think I'll just stick with the standard drivers now. Or will those intel ones give me much better performance?
Thanks everybody for the help, much appreciated!