Ultra DMA not working - HD slow in PIO mode

[jkolak]

Hi,

Running XP Pro SP3. I visited PC Pitstop and learned that my hard drive is running too slow because Ultra DMA is not running and that my drive has dropped down to PIO, reducing my throughput from an expected 30 Mb/s to 3.

It said Microsoft indicates I/O errors as the most common cause for dropping out of UDMA. Looking in Disk Manager, I see the partitions are marked "At Risk". Looking in Help and Support, it says this label is applied after I/O errors. It recommends reactivating the underlying disk to reset the partitions to a "Healthy" status.

The problem is, I don't understand exactly what this means or how to do it. I presume it is referring to the physical disk as opposed to the logical disk. In Disk Manager, I can right click the partitions, and there is a Reactivate menu option, but it is grayed out.

Motherboard is Soyo KT400 Dragon with Via Bus Master IDE controller 0571. I have downloaded the latest HyperIon drivers. Hard drive is Seagate ST3250823A, about a year old. I have the correct 80 pin ribbon cable and the DVD slave is able to run in UDMA even though the hard drive cannot. Drive is partioned into 25GB C:, 25GB D:, and the rest on E:

The only odd thing is have C: as the second partition because I was running triple boot, and didn't like the OS running on the first partition. Otherwise Windows runs fine. Well, I shouldn't say that. This XP has constant problems with freezing and needing to be rebooted (plus hard start - like a car.... hehe!) I've reset BIOS from Optimized to Fail Safe and it has been quite stable for a couple of days now. Still doesn't recover from Sleep (S3) though. Not sure on hard starting. Need more time to see how "Fail Safe" is helping me.

Note: This is not the same computer that is being helped on the Malware Forum!

Thanks

[patio]

IDE drive or SATA ? ?
If IDE go to Device Manager...Clik IDE controllers to expand the list.
Right clik and select Properties and make the appropiate changes in there.
Re-boot and double check that the settings were retained.

UDMA if available is the optimum setting...

NOTE 1 very common reason for this occuring is when you have 3 or 4 consecutive read/write errors from a HDD...therefore i'd suggest DLoading the diagnostics from the HDD manuf site...follow the info on creating a bootable CD and boot to the CD and run the long test.

[jkolak]

Thanks. This is an IDE drive.

After a little more poking around I discovered in Disk Management that if I right click on the Disk 0 area at the left instead of on the partition area, the Reactivate Disk menu item is available. Doing that removed the "At Risk" label as indicated in Help and Support, but it did not give me back UDMA on the drive.

So I followed your suggestion and visited Seagate. All I could see is Seatools for Windows, but the program is really sharp. After running it, it told me the same as you, to run the live CD, which is called Seatools for DOS, and also told me that the ISO was included in the installation directory.

After running that, it failed my drive on the short test and recommended the long test for repair and the possibility to get a new status of "Pass after repair" on the retest. 14 bad LBAs were found and repaired, and I did indeed get the new status, "Pass after repair".

This did not, however, return my drive to UDMA. The Device Manager setting is already at DMA if Available, however, the status bar under it says "Current Transfer Mode: PIO Mode"

Any more ideas?

Thanks

[jkolak]

I ran SiS Sandra to look a little closer into this. Sandra said my drive was already in Ultra DMA-5, but still only benchmarked 3 MB/s. So I Googled this and found two sites which said that once Windows decides a drive is PIO, it won't switch back on its own.

One site listed registry keys to edit out the information that the drives had I/O errors, but the other had a more simple solution to uninstall the IDE interface that was showing PIO mode, reboot to complete the removal, reboot again to complete the re-installation, and then check Properties again.

Worked for me! Drive now showing 53 MB/s and Windows acknowledges UDMA-5.

[patio]

Good to hear you got it...

So I Googled this and found two sites which said that once Windows decides a drive is PIO, it won't switch back on its own.

As you can see you can't believe everything on the web.

Welcome Aboard.