Hi -

I have a rather irritating problem with my PC. I recently bought an ATA/66 cable to replace my old 40-line one - my motherboard (claims to) support this, and my Seagate drive does too, so I thought I might as well get the extra oomph.

I ran the little Seagate app to enable the appropriate mode on the drive, turned on "DMA" on the devices screen of the control panel, and one quick reboot later - Windows won't start. Well, it *nearly* starts - it goes into "Safe mode" okay, but won't start *properly*. It generally stops just after loading all the drivers, then sits there with the drive light on until it finally times-out and goes to a blue screen complaining that there was a problem writing to the drive.

I fiddled about with it for a while, then gave up and re-installed Windows; the problem went away. Then, in a triumph of optimism over realism, I re-enabled DMA on the drive, and there it was, kaput again.

So, I have two questions I'd dearly love answers to:

1) How can I tell Windows to disable DMA on that drive again so that I can at least get some life out of my machine without copping out and reinstalling (blush!)
2) What am I doing wrong, anyway? Everything claims to be ATA/66 capable, but there's clearly something iffy here.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Regards -

Richard

I'm not sure if I have the answer, but you DO need to turn "on" ATA-66 support on the mobo...there should be a Bios setting for that support. I think you should leave Windows out of it alltogether..this is a mobo / hard drive deal I believe.

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I sometimes think like a 286

Randy I agree with you. It sounds like the Bios needs to have the first boot drive be the ATA 66. Look in the manual for your motherboard, it should show the steps to install the ATA 66 and what would need to be changed in the Bios.

What motherboard is it? If you need aditional help give us your system information.
Motherboard Make and Model #
and any other equipment, this will help us help you with the problem.

Cheers http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

Hi -

Yes, I should have posted more details, sorry. The Mobo is an FIC SD11 (a Slot A job) with a 500MHz Athlon. The disk is a Seagate ST36421A.

I'd assumed it must have been a Windows problem since it was doing something in Windows which seemed to cause the problem - perhaps it just *revealed* the problem though.

Looking through the BIOS setup doesn't show anything that is obviously helpful to turning things on - the manual just says to use the appropriate cable "Blue end to the controller".

However, I notice that there's a BIOS update on FIC's website to the effect of "Add setup item for user to select IDE cable size". Reckon that might be the sort of thing I should be looking for?

Cheers for the help - it's nice to know I'm not completely adrift and lost, here!

Richard

Pay careful attention to the instructions for doing a bios update for your motherboard....It's not that difficult, but a messup causes a big problem. You will probably need a bios update to get the support for the new hard drive....I beleive that is an early version of the Slot A mobo and Slot A's are about gone now with Tbirds socket A (Socket 462) out now.

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Wore out my Ctrl/Alt/Del keys with Win ME

Hi again -

Well, I successfully flashed my bios and gained the new functionality; however, the problem still persists <sigh>

Can you possibly suggest anything else I might try ...?

Regards -

Richard

OK........the "little Seagate app" you ran to give the HD ATA-66 capability apparently DIDNT work! If everything else is done right that is all that is left.....Are you certain you installed the correct Seagate app for your exact model? Email Seagate with the results of what has been going on and I bet they will have a solution.

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My 386 notebook is faster than yours -nanny nanny boo boo !

>OK........the "little Seagate app" you ran to give the HD ATA-66 >capability apparently DIDNT work!

Fair enough! I'll drop them a line today, and I'll let you know (Just for the sake of completeness!) what transpires.

Thanks again!

Richard

I've been doing a little expeimenting with DMA recently and I found that if I made some changes then I needed to set the drives to auto-detect in BIOS before things would actually work right. It seems that if there is a mis-match in the DMA settings and the drives aren't on auto-detect then Windows goes belly-up, but if they are on auto-detect then Windows can figure out whats up.

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mjc
To ME or NOT to ME....

Hi -

Well, I'll give some detail about what eventually happened here, but it's not a very happy tale I'm afraid.

I decided to reinstall Windows in the end, as the only way I could find to make the blasted thing start up. I suspected that trying to install new busmaster drivers (which was what Seagate suggested) while in Safe Mode probably wouldn't be too successful.

Right; clean install - everything okay again. Phew! I actually left it that way without tinkering further for a few days, just out of relief to see it working again. But the devil in me can't help it, so before long I was reinstalling the drivers and guess what? It *still* didn't work.

So I give up, really. I'm left assuming that there's some conflict or problem that's not obvious or trivial, and I'll leave it at ATA/33 until I upgrade the whole lot to something newer.

Having said that, it's only a matter of time before MJC's comment piques my interest and I break the thing again ;-)

Just to recap, to perhaps save other folk from my fate; I was trying to run a Seagate ST36421A at ATA/66 on an FIC SD11 motherboard with a 500MHz Athlon. It didn't work!

Thanks everyone -

Richard

One question, are the CD drive and hard drive on the same IDE channel?

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mjc
I'm making my own links list:Computer Links (http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/highrise/11/index.htm)

If it will make you feel better......you would have NEVER been able to tell the difference in HD access doing "real world" stuff on the system between ATA 33 & 66 http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

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"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT

Hi -

No, the CD and hard drive were on separate channels.

I'll take some consolation that I wouldn't notice the difference, thanks! But there's always that feeling that I want bigger, better, faster, more <G>

Cheers -
Richard