K7TPro2-a owners... Iomega/Plextor 12/10/32 and DVD issues

Vinnie2pliers

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Dec 21, 2000
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This Question / Answer is reposted without permission from the "alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.msi-microstar" newsgroup. I though it may interest K7TPro2-a owners since so many bought the Iomega 12/10/32 on sale this weekend. (Iomega's drive is a re-badged Plextor)...

POST from: Chris Searight
E-mail: reincry@earthlink.net

For the life of me, I can't get DMA to run stable on my Pioneer DVD-104 and my Plextor 12/10/32A. I had the Pioneer running on my ASUS K7M in UDMA just fine no problems at all. Now, when I enable DMA for both drives (btw the Pioneer is the Secondary Master and the Plextor is the Secondary Slave) Windows Me boots up just fine and says UDMA/DMA is enabled. Now, here's the kicker, when I go to install a game or any CD that has Autorun, the damn thing gets errors and won't run anything! I can go to the drive and look at all the contents on the discs without any problems, but trying to run something is a whole different ballgame. If I disable UDMA/DMA the drives install games/run autorun just fine. To make thing more complicated, I tried disabling all UDMA support in the BIOS instead of "Auto" then rebooted. I then checked UDMA/DMA for both drives in Windows ME. Then rebooted. The DMA boxes stay checked, and I can run autorun CDs and programs off of the Pioneer. The question is, is it really running at UDMA???? Any suggestions? I have even tried both BIOS versions 1.8 and 1.9. Both do the same thing. I also tried reversing the Plextor and the Pioneer as far as master/slave configuration is concerned. I tried the leaked VIA drivers and the 686B Busmaster drivers, but neither of them take care of the problem. Anyone want to list out their BIOS settings for me?:)

K7TPro2-a
256 PC133 Crucial Memory
IBM Deskstar 30 gig ATA 100 Drive (Primary Master)
Maxtor 15 Gig ATA 66 Drive (Primary Slave)
Pioneer DVD-104 (Secondary Master)
Plextor 12/10/32A (Secondary Slave)
Creative Labs Soundblaster Live X-Gamer 5.1 (PCI Slot 2)
Creative Labs Annihilator Pro (AGP Slot)
Klipsch Promedias
Zoom (I can't belive I am going to admit this) PCI 5shitK modem (PCI Slot 4)

Thanks!
Chris
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ANSWER from: Robert Inkol
E-mail: robert.inkol@home.com

I've seen problems when cd and cdr drives share the same ide channel. In one
case, I only resolved them by substituting a differend cdrom drive (btw the
motherboard had an intel chipset).

I would remove both drives, physically and in the device manager. After this I would install one of the cd drives and see if I could get it to work satisfactorily before trying to install the second. I would not enable autorun for the cdrw drive and would be careful to ensure that both are correctly jumpered for master/slave operation. If you are using a ata66 cable, it might be an idea to use cable select to determine this.

Robert Inkol

If you can, it might be an idea to reconfigure the drives so that 1 hd and 1 cd drive is on each ide channel. This is often desirable for copying from cd to cd.