johnnymk

I disconnected a Secondary IDE Master Hard Drive temporarily which had not been physically secured and then reconnected it. It is not my boot drive. My boot drive is a SCSI drive. I was fooling with some Configuration settings in the BIOS menu ( I forget which ones ).

Anyway. it takes about a minute for the BIOS to recognize the IDE drives. Before, it took a second. And I think the transfer speed in the IDE drive has slowed down, but I am not sure of that. The reason I suspect the slower speed is that a DVD rated at 8X took over 23 minutes to burn from the IDE drive to the burner. Previously, it took around 12 minutes.

Any suggestions?

EDIT: It appears I forgot to hook the power plug to the Secondary Slave DVD burner. I wonder if that will affect the speed of the hard drive?

Jeffbx

Do you now have 4 IDE devices connected? If not, are the empty IDE ports disabled in BIOS?

Also, check in the IDE advanced settings in Device Manager to verify that your DVD is set to DMA and not PIO mode. Actually, check that on all of your IDE channels.

johnnymk

I thought XP automatically set all IDE drives to DMA. If not. how is it done?
I only have three IDE drives connected. I never knew there could be a problem with that. If that affects transfer speed or anything else, I learned a valuable lesson today.

Jeffbx

Yes, XP does set them automatically to DMA. However, if XP detects issues on the drive, it will automatically lower them the the more stable and much much slower PIO mode. Unfortunately, once XP degrades the drives it's a little tricky getting them back to DMA mode.

Google 'PIO DMA' or have a look at the threads here in HW & SW. I think there are a couple of people having similar issues.

johnnymk

I'm OK. It's back to normal...Thanks