A7V, Asus DVD and DMA

[TrollMan]

I'm having some problems at the moment with my Asus E612 DVD-ROM drive - DMA is disabled in Windows, if I try to enable it the box is always unchecked again after I reboot. Looked in BIOS, UDMA set to 4 for the drive. I changed it to 2, saved and rebooted, watched Windows start to load again - and the drive was listed as UDMA 4 again! Yet still DMA is obviously not enabled as, for example, there is lots of stuttering while watching DVD movies identical to my old system (Gigabte mobo, Creative 5x drive) with DMA disabled. On that system enabling DMA fixed stuttering. I also have a Toshiba 4x4x8x24 DVD/CD-R/W (SD-1002R I think) which exhibits the same problem in Windows but in BIOS reports UDMA is diabled. Enabling UDMA does not work as this resets when I save settings and exit... what's going on?

Specs:
Athlon 1.1GHz
Asus A7V, BIOS 1004D
512MB RAM
64MB GeForce 2 Ultra, 6.34 Detonators (most stable in PowerDVD when I use it)
SB Live Platinum 5.1, drivers from CD
IBM 7200rpm 46Gb HDD, IBM 5400rpm 15Gb HDD
Asus E612 12x DVD-ROM
Toshiba all-in-one DVD/CD-R/W SD-1002R
RealMagic Hollywood Plus, 1.8.2 drivers
Win 98SE, DirectX 8
Videologic Digitheatre DTS speakers

Thanks for any help!

 

[sandorski]

Have you installed the VIA 4in1 drivers? Are you using the VIA IDE drivers? IMO, install the 4in1s and use the VIA IDE drivers, despite what others may recommend. When installing the 4in1s, click the "enable DMA" box.

 

[TrollMan]

Looking in my system properties, I have (under hard disk controllers):

Primary IDE Controller (dual fifo)
Secondary IDE Controller (dual fifo)
VIA bus master PCI IDE controller - In setting, dual IDE channel settings is set to "default"

Sorry, I've never had a VIA chipset motherboard before so I'm not at all used to the 4in1 drivers - which should I download, and from where?

Thanks for the help so far!

 

[TrollMan]

K, that was a nightmare! Tried 4.25, 4.26 and 4.27 drivers - 4.25 was giving me constant BSODs on boot, wouldn't finish booting at all so I went into safe mode and installed 4.26 which solved that but didn't fix the DMA problem - in fact didn't appear to change anything at all. Also was detecting PCI bus etc but was prompting for location of drivers - none in the 4in1 directory I unzipped to or any other directories described that files were installed to, nowhere on the PC at all in fact. So installed 4.27, still no difference and again prompting for files, also windows locked up 3 times in a row during or immediately after booting (keyboard lock too), has stopped doing it but BSOD while booting about half the time (so far), can continue on though. All BSODs have been fatal exception errors in 016F:[varied]. And DMA exactly the same, I even tested by going into BIOS, changing setting, going to save (no exit) then going back to the setting to see it had reset itself! What on earth is going on?