[Ozric]

A quick question for the tech gurus...

I just installed a new 160 GB HDD as Slave in my stock Dell (P4 2.66), with the Master drive being the 80 GB Maxtor that the PC came with. There's a problem transfering data from the old drive to the new one; it's taxing my CPU almost 100% constantly.

I checked the properties of the IDE controllers in Device Manager, and while "Use DMA if Available" is selected for both channels, the Current Transfer Mode shows up as PIO for "Device 1" under the Primary IDE channel.

Is there anything I can do to enable Ultra DMA transfer, and what does Device 0/1 refer to?

Thanks!

 

[AuroraProject]

Get it out of PIO quick!! Use Ultra DMA mode 5. Oh and enter BIOS and make sure the new drive is being recognized. Hit F2 at the Dell splash screen, look for "Primary Device 0" and "Primary Device 1", they should both be set to "Auto" and say "Hard Drive" next to them.

 

[Snake]

It's not quite that simple - try what AuroraProject recommends. But some drives just will not co-exist with other drives - Western Digitals and Maxtor / Seagates being (classically) very well known for this issue. Back years ago it was because WD and Maxtor / Seagate actually used different implimentations of the IDE standard (yes, there "were" 2). You might be seeing a similar problem, maybe between one drive running LBA and the other Linear.

The most "sure-fire" was is to move the second hard drive to the secondary IDE channel. In this way if Windows is using a different driver for each device they won't clash.

 

[Ozric]

Alright, I found the solution online...I had to make a change in the BIOS, where an option related to IDE was set to "Off" rather than "Auto." Once I toggled that, it fixed the PIO issue; now one drive is running in Ultra DMA 5 mode and the other in Ultra DMA 2. Speeds are fine now, and CPU load is back to normal