Transfer Mode Downgraded

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#1

I noticed when I was burning the Vista RC1 DVD that ..

I began to suspect something was awry with the IDE controller that the DVD-R drive is connected to. I navigated to Device Manager, expanded the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers tree node, right-clicked the Parallel ATA Controller node and selected properties.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/transfer-mode-downgraded.html
#2

Interesting looking IDE channel config box. It’s obviously not what’s in the hardware manager; is it some nifty tool you’re going to share with us all?

#3

Hmmm… I ran into something similar a couple of days ago.

http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/7246.aspx

So did this occur on Vista for your or on XP?

I checked my settings in Vista and the dialogs don’t allow these options, but I do see DMA Mode enabled on both devices.

#4

There’s another nice set of info and workarounds on the CD/DVD-ROM transfer mode problem here:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/

#5

“Interesting looking IDE channel config box. It’s obviously not what’s in the hardware manager; is it some nifty tool you’re going to share with us all?”

I get those exact screens here on a vanilla XP install and turns out I had the same issue. Did you follow his directions for getting there?

#6

I have XP Pro SP2 on a PC with a motherboard-integrated Intel Ultra ATA controller, and Device Manager - IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers offers nothing like this. I can’t see any way to determine or change the transfer mode at all. There is no dialog with a “Secondary Channel” tab.

It may be that the drivers for some controllers offer features that others do not.

#7

I believe the dialog pictured is based on the nVidia nForce chipset drivers…

I just checked on a web server here, and I see a similar (though not identical dialog) under the Primary IDE Channel. In the properties dialog for the Primary IDE Channel there’s an “Advanced Settings” tab which has the current transfer mode and a drop-down menu which lets me change the DMA mode.

That’s based on the “Intel 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers”.

#8

I think it was 2000 where PIO was selected by default on CD-ROM drives.