No UDMA for Cdroms on secondary IDE

M

Morpheus

Guest
My config:

MSI K7T turbo (latest bios)
Via chipset (latest drivers also tried ide miniport driver)
Athlon XP 1700+
prim master 40GB IBM 60gxp
prim slave 6,4GB WD
sec master dvd/cdrom Aopen 16x (UDMA4)
sec slave cdburner Aopen crw3248 (UDMA2)

I've got a strange problem. My cdrom are not able to reach UDMA. The bios shows the right UDMA-mode. But in windows XP they will only get to Multiword DMA 2. When I change my config I found out that my cdroms will get UDMA on primary IDE and but not on secondary IDE. For experimental reasons I even changed my primary and secondary so my cdrom are on prim and my hd on sec. Everything works, everything is UDMA but I heard that it is not advisable to put you boot hd on secondary IDE. So I changed it back
I also tried to change the registry (according to an article I found on this forum) to manually set it to UDMA but it changes to multiword dma 2 again by boot up.
This problem also occurs with win2k. Any one got a suggestion!?!?

Thanx Bob
 
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The Multiword DMA issue dates all the way back to last summer with K7T Turbos

Back then, most people were running Windows 9x/Me. SInce these versions of Windows only showed a "DMA check box" in the device manager, most customers diditn know of the problem. Of course, those who had Windows 2000 saw the same problem you are seeing now But that was a smaller group of customers at the time (Win2K)

The old, old forum from last June had lots of posts about this, but I dont thinkw e can access it any more.

As for where it comes from. It seems to be BIOS related. In my testing last year, only the original BIOS v2.4 provided full UDMA levels with no "multiword" in the device manager.

At the time, I wrote to MSI on numerous occasions asking why BIOS v2.4 provided UDMA but v2.5 and higher showed "Multiword DMA" However, of all the correspondence I would get back from MSI, they never returned a single e-mail when this issue was the topic I was asking about

So unless you want to go all the way back to BIOS v2.4, or unless Im missing something - Multiword DMA is just what youll have to live with on that mobo.

In the year I owned a Turbo or Turbo Limited Edition (which just died on me :( ) - all my results show that the Multiword was still pretty darn fast. So Id say just ignore it til you get a different mobo.

 
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I cant go back to that old bios because I have an Athlon XP now. But still I think its strange that it is only on secondary and not on primary. I called MSI a couple of times and they were making contact to somebody in asia so maybe they have some suggestions. And btw a new Mobo is very expensive because there are no newer board that support sdram :( so would be a expensive upgrade.

Thanx,

Bob
 
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