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Yet more HD woes.. hard drive stuck in PIO mode

M

MDesigner

Platinum Member
What a pain. So my cousin got a WD 300GB HD, and installed it (WinXP Home). At first, XP would only see the first 127GB or so. He found a WD utility that he ran which somehow unlocked the full 300GB. But the drive is still stuck in PIO mode. Yeah he has the latest ASUS drivers for his motherboard installed, and the latest BIOS. And XP SP2. So what's the deal here? We also tried the trick where you uninstall the IDE busses from the dev. mgr. and they reinstall themselves upon boot. That didn't work. Any suggestions?
 
had this same problem a bunch of years ago, dont remember what i did to fix it , sorry'


i think maybe uninstalled everything from device manager, cant say for sure
 
http://users.bigpond.net.au/ni...tserviceduck/udma_fix/

What constitutes a bad (optical) read that can trigger access errors and the PIO failback? These fairly routine causes equate to frequent potential harm to your IDE config:

Cause
Explanation

Scratched
Ever used those library or rental discs that look like they were cleaned with sandpaper? Humans have no respect.

Incorrectly burnt
Unfinished / buffer under-run / table of contents glitched / laser power fluctuations.

Incompatibly burnt
Open session / multi-session / re-writeable media being used in a different drive (trying to open DVD-RW on certain DVD-R drives is almost as common as the scratched disc cause).

Dubious firmware
The media descriptors pre-written on the blank discs of each format (eg: DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW) are supposed to be industry standard, but it seems lately there is some flexibilty in these standards(?) Different disc brands seem to fail in certain drives, even though the drive is supposed to be compatible with that particular drive. Updating the drive?s firmware to the most recent (ie: released in the last few months) has stopped the PIO failback problem returning for a couple of DVD drives I?ve played with that kept tripping on particular brands of disc.

Wrong strap
80-conductor ATA cables shouldn?t be shorter 25cm. Neither 80-conductor or 40-conductor straps should be longer than 45cm. 40-conductor cables can be optionally swapped for 80s on devices higher than the ATA/33 standard (33MB/sec) but shouldn?t be used at all past ATA/66. You can usually tell (at least with AMI and AWARD BIOS) that a slow cable is attached to a fast device when you see ?no 80 connector cable installed? during the POST (Power On Self Test).

Devices with greatly different access times share one IDE port
Rather than share an IDE cable and port, most technogeeks (including this one) recommend having your hard drive(s) on the primary port (IDE1) and your CD/DVD reader(s)/writer(s) on the seconary port (IDE2), especially when video-DVD playback or disc burning is involved. So too, if you combine old drives and new drives in a system, group them according to their speeds; don?t strap a thoroughbred onto an old nag. Think of the data queing logistics within the system.
 
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