Dunno if this is the right forum, but it's concerning VIA chipsets(southbridge) and UDMA hardrives.
I've been having trouble enabling UDMA for my new Maxtor 40gig hardrive 7200 RPM on the primary IDE controller. I installed the 4.37's with the PCI IDE Bus Master drivers. I'm running Win2K with SP2. My motherboard is a ABIT KT7.
Problem is that the hardrive keeps showing up as PIO mode under Device Manager. The CD ROMS on the secondary channel show up ok at UDMA. Don't tell me that I might have my cables or BIOS settings are wrong.....checked that already. BIOS bootup screen shows ATA66.
My hardrive under PIO mode is so freakin' sloooooooooow. Random stutters playing Mp3s, slow thumbnail caching under Acdsee, etc. Takes like half a hour to bench under Sandra, got a hardrive score of 3000. Should be ~13000 for a ATA 66 hardrive. I installed the 4.28 IDE drivers(the ones with a DMA Tool). The Device Manager now associate the channels with "VIA ULTRA DMA BUS Channel" and the VIA Bus Master Ultra ATA Controller comes up as not installed. With this driver setup, I believe that the hardrive is running under DMA mode and it shows up as so with the VIA DMA tool that is included with the 4.28 drivers. I get a Sandra Bench of 13000 -15000. Programs run excellent with a little pickup. hardrive come up as SCSI devices under Device manager though. Fine.
BUT, my CD writer cannot burn CDs with CLONECD now. According to CLONECD: CloneCD uses very uncommon sector sizes for the transfer. Certain DMA Busmaster drivers for VIA or ALI chipsets are not working properly with these transfer sizes. You should get an update of the IDE Busmaster drivers from ALI or VIA for your motherboard. So, i'm back at the IDE driver problem; I dont want to install the 4.37 drivers and have my computer run slow like molasses. I will never go back to PIO.
I've been checking out the VIA Arena site for a solution. There's an IDE Filter and a IDE mini port driver. After reading all the FAQ's and other documentation, I can't get a definitive answer for which to install. In fact, I'm hella confused as to what they are. What's up with all these different naming conventions for the IDE drives? In one driver release, it's Busmaster drivers, in another it's VIA ATAPI Vendor Support Driver and now it's PCI IDE Bus Driver ?!!?? I looked in the VIA user forums and there are hundreds of threads about the different IDE drivers and the DMA---->PIO problem. No one has a clear solution to this problem. Doesn't look like it's going to be coming from VIA either.
Anybody has a understanding of this problem and a solution? I see quite a few threads with the DMA--->PIO problem as well here. is it really that hard for VIA to come up with a fix for the IDE problems? i've tried reinstalling and unistalling (by the way, the Uninstall feature doesn't really seem to work) the VIA drivers and FUBARed my computer a couple of times already. This is ridiculous. Sorry for the lengthy post. Thanks in advance.
I've been having trouble enabling UDMA for my new Maxtor 40gig hardrive 7200 RPM on the primary IDE controller. I installed the 4.37's with the PCI IDE Bus Master drivers. I'm running Win2K with SP2. My motherboard is a ABIT KT7.
Problem is that the hardrive keeps showing up as PIO mode under Device Manager. The CD ROMS on the secondary channel show up ok at UDMA. Don't tell me that I might have my cables or BIOS settings are wrong.....checked that already. BIOS bootup screen shows ATA66.
My hardrive under PIO mode is so freakin' sloooooooooow. Random stutters playing Mp3s, slow thumbnail caching under Acdsee, etc. Takes like half a hour to bench under Sandra, got a hardrive score of 3000. Should be ~13000 for a ATA 66 hardrive. I installed the 4.28 IDE drivers(the ones with a DMA Tool). The Device Manager now associate the channels with "VIA ULTRA DMA BUS Channel" and the VIA Bus Master Ultra ATA Controller comes up as not installed. With this driver setup, I believe that the hardrive is running under DMA mode and it shows up as so with the VIA DMA tool that is included with the 4.28 drivers. I get a Sandra Bench of 13000 -15000. Programs run excellent with a little pickup. hardrive come up as SCSI devices under Device manager though. Fine.
BUT, my CD writer cannot burn CDs with CLONECD now. According to CLONECD: CloneCD uses very uncommon sector sizes for the transfer. Certain DMA Busmaster drivers for VIA or ALI chipsets are not working properly with these transfer sizes. You should get an update of the IDE Busmaster drivers from ALI or VIA for your motherboard. So, i'm back at the IDE driver problem; I dont want to install the 4.37 drivers and have my computer run slow like molasses. I will never go back to PIO.
I've been checking out the VIA Arena site for a solution. There's an IDE Filter and a IDE mini port driver. After reading all the FAQ's and other documentation, I can't get a definitive answer for which to install. In fact, I'm hella confused as to what they are. What's up with all these different naming conventions for the IDE drives? In one driver release, it's Busmaster drivers, in another it's VIA ATAPI Vendor Support Driver and now it's PCI IDE Bus Driver ?!!?? I looked in the VIA user forums and there are hundreds of threads about the different IDE drivers and the DMA---->PIO problem. No one has a clear solution to this problem. Doesn't look like it's going to be coming from VIA either.
Anybody has a understanding of this problem and a solution? I see quite a few threads with the DMA--->PIO problem as well here. is it really that hard for VIA to come up with a fix for the IDE problems? i've tried reinstalling and unistalling (by the way, the Uninstall feature doesn't really seem to work) the VIA drivers and FUBARed my computer a couple of times already. This is ridiculous. Sorry for the lengthy post. Thanks in advance.