Alright, I posted about this in the XP forum about 3 days ago, and one thing stuck out was the possibility that the CD-RW I have is in PIO mode. Turns out it is.. however it will not switch to DMA. It's on a 40-pin IDE Cable as the master (no slave). As far as I know, it *should* still be able to enter DMA mode on a 40 pin.. right? As I read, the 80 pin cable is designed for UDMA 100 or higher. Also: I have a 6 gig slaved to my 40 gig. The 40 is UDMA 5 (133), and the 6 gig is UDMA 2 (33..or is it 66?), but the 6 gig won't go to UDMA at all in XP, it's also in PIO mode. Is it because it's slaved? Colin

Not all drives are DMA capable. But if they are you have to install the correct driver. UDMA-2 is 33mhz You didn't say what kind of problem you are having.

You got your wires and pins mixed up. There are two basic cables, an 80 wire and a 40 wire but both use 40 pin connectors. The 80 wire is used for UDMA66 and 100 and the 40 wire for 33. You're right that the cd-r should be cable of DMA with a 33 type cable. Have you looked in the BIOS Setup to see if there's a setting you can change from PIO to DMA if that's really the problem? You may also be able to change this in Device Manager, might be checkbox for DMA. You really shouldn't have to install any special drivers for a regular CD-RW. Windows should install it fine. What part of the system is telling you the drives are in PIO mode, the BIOS? Slaving a drive will not effect its abiltiy to use DMA (not to my knowledge).

Thanks for the replies. First off, the 6 gig is UDMA 2 compatible, the BIOS states it, but Windows XP itself won't enable DMA. >.< The CD-Rom.. as far I can tell, cannot have DMA mode. The BIOS won't allow it (PIO 4 is the only option it will allow, but then it doesn't give any option about regular DMA.. (though I'm unsure of that's existance. :P)) And yes, I apologize, I meant wires not pins.. it's just easier to say 80-pin for some reason, floats off the tongue better. The "problem" is basically, because the CD-ROM is in PIO mode, the system has to halt and wait for the CD-Rom to give it's info. This is bad when viewing movies off of a CD, whether they be mpegs, mp2, divx, anything. It also causes any background music to stutter. Similar effect with anything in PIO mode, but I can't see a work-around.

XP, when it detects errors, will step down the speed. So from udma5, it'll go udma4, udma3, etc. Once it's dropped, you can't bring it back up. try to uninstall your ide channels in device manager. when XP reinstalls drivers for it, set the channels to "dma if available". that should make XP reset it to the fastest value. I'm guessing XP detected an error in the drive, causing XP to limit it. Now, if it does it again, you might want to know what and why the error is happening (could be read error, write error, etc)

I had the same problem. It turned out to be the IDE-drivers that XP installed. I installed the win2000 drivers that I found on the cd that came with my motherboard, and that solved the problem. also, set your cd-rw to autodetect in your bios to avoid bufferproblems... If you computer is older then 3 years, and the problem still isn't solved, you could try to change the ide-cables Hope this helps Johan