DMA Problems

[Legacy6]

Here's something that will make you beat your head against the walls trying to figure this out. I've put together a system built around a PII/450, Abit BH6 ver 1.01, 128 MB RAM, and a 10.2 GB Western Digital hd. The problem I have with this setup is that every time I try to enable DMA access in Windows 98SE for the hd, when I reboot, my system locks up when it gets back to the desktop. The only thing I can do is boot into safe mode, delete the parent IDE controler from System Manager, delete the hd and the IDE children from registry, reboot and let Windows redetect it again, and then it would be fine as long as I stayed away from DMA. I even loaded the latest drivers for the 440BX chipset from Intel, but it still happened. Yesterday I discovered the CD-Rom drive was causing this, so I removed and proceeded to reinstall Windows since I messed it up quite a bit while trying to find out what was causing this problem. Now I'm almost done configuring it and the problem started appearing again. I don't know what else to try, and I ready to go get the sledgehammer and kill this system. Pls help me before I do something I will regret. Thanks.

 

[Henry Kuo]

Is the CDROM in the same primary IDE channel as the hdd? If so, try to put it in the secondary IDE channel and set the hdd to use DMA. If that's not the case, I don't know what else you can do.

 

[Legacy6]

The only IDE device in this PC is the hard drive. This way it worked fine all morning long yesterday when I started everything from scratch, but it went nuts again after I installed Norton Utilities 2000 and run the System Check.

 

[IsOs]

Reinstall & forget about Norton 2000.

 

[Henry Kuo]

Yeah, forget everything except norton antivirus if you want. I don't see anything useful about norton except the virus scan.

 

[Legacy6]

Anybody else has other ideas? I just hate having to spend another day reinstalling everything. But, if I have no choice, I might just take that PC to work, set it up on the second monitor on my desk, and redo it while I take care of some other things.

 

[Henry Kuo]

hmm, does uninstall of the norton helps?

 

[dvch]

Make sure that the DMA box in Device Manager is NOT checked.For some screwy reason it will sometimes re-check itself after you have removed it. Just keep uncnecking till it takes.

 

[Legacy6]

I haven't tried uninstalling Norton Utilities because I still want to use Disk Doctor and Speed Disk (I think they're better than Scandisk and Defragmenter). Besides, I've used it in other occasions and I've never had any problems with it, and least not until now. Anyway, I managed to disable DMA access and the PC has been running without DMA since Saturday, but I'm looking for a way to make it work with DMA enabled. I don't know why it does this, especially since I had this motherboard in my main system and the hard drive as a secondary drive on the same system until less than a month ago and they all got along well. I guess I'll take the system appart again next weekend, double check how everything is seated in the case (is it possible that the motherboard is somehow touching one of the stand-offs and making a bad ground???), and then try reinstalling Windows.