Any way to disallow optical drive reverting to PIO mode?

[BatmanNate]

This is a problem that has plagued me since first adopting Windows 2000, and has followed into XP so I'm going to assume it's one of those "features" that we could do without. When I copy from both of my optical drives at once (a Pioneer 16X DVD and a Liteon 48x24x48 CDRW) after a while one of the drives will default back to PIO mode. I've heard this is due to I/O errors during copying, but it does not prompt you. Both drives are set to DMA at the begining of the operation, and once one of them reverts to PIO you know because everything slows down like molasses on a cold winter day. The only way I've found to reset them both back to DMA is to physically swap the channel/cable/slave/master setting, which is a pain in the butt when transfering half a TB of data from CDR. Does anybody know of a workaround or registry edit that will force it to keep DMA regardless? Any and all help is appreciated.

(My OS is WinXP Pro SP1, and both drives are Masters on their own IDE controllers on the mainboard and support UDMA2)

 

[DannyBoy]

Half a terabyte? :Q:Q:Q

How do you manage to fit that amount of data on a CDR :Q

Have you tried a search because im sure i saw a thread about this back at christmas last year.

Dan

 

[BatmanNate]

The data is across multiple CDR's, not a single disc. Some 800 or so discs, hence me irritation at this problem. I've seen threads on this problem before, however I couldn't find any other solution besides manually swapping the channel/master setting on the drives.