EPoX DMA issue with CD burner

[JH]

I have a Teac CD-W516E burner on an EPoX 8k7a board, and W98SE OS.
I have the 7/11 bios, AMD Miniport, lastest VIA IDE bus, USB, and audio
drivers from the EPoX web site installed, as well as the MS USB fix for
USB. Not that this matters, because the symptoms haven't changed through
any of my installs.

I have an IBM 40G 7200RPM HD on primary master.
My Teac is on the secondary master. The Teac is spec'd for UltraDMA mode
2.

I can check DMA in Control Panel for the hard drive properties, and the
system works.

However, when I do the same for the Teac, I get error notifications when
I try to install software from the drive. (The notifications are not
consistant with various setups/tweaks, etc.)

Can't figure out why I cannot check this box for the Teac. (The box
stays checked after reboot.) I also tried manually setting DMA Mode 2 in
bios, and have the latest firmware revision for the Teac.) When I leave
this box unchecked for the Teac, it runs fine, but I don't know if it is
optimum. Any ideas?

 

[mothman]

<< lastest VIA IDE bus >>



Do you mean the VIA busmaster drivers?
If so this might be your problem.
From my own experience with CDRs and from what I have
read on the internet VIA busmaster drivers and CDR don't mix.

Hope this helps........

 

[JH]

FINALLY found the answer after some further digging (or at least an approach to try). I went into BIOS and disabled UDMA for the master and slave of the secondary channel. Booted up and reset the DMA checkbox for the Teac and my old PIO3 drive on secondary slave, and everything works great! I'm even getting files transferred from the Secondary slave HD to my Primary Master HD with no file corruptions. Everything is smooth as silk. I wish motherboard manuals were more informative than stating the the BIOS setting enables or disables. DAH! Why not say why to do so or not!