hello all. the computer is detecting that dma is turned off for one or more of the recording devices attached to the system i had nero and removed it and installed sonic record now and that says the same, but when i go into the device manager and check the ide/ata/atapi controllers, primary ide channel is set to pio only and the secondary channel is ok at dma if available. the thing is when i change the primary controller to dma if available and reboot or even without a reboot the dvd/rw drive while im burning anything is extreamly slow and cannot burn my files properly. its like a catch twenty two situation at the moment dell says after spending as much time as i have trying to fix this problem you will have to reformat the hard drive? i for one dont believe you should have to reformat the hard drive for something like this. i bought this computer 9 months ago, 8 weeks later the card cage fan went, they fixed that, then the motherboard went it was a bad chipset that fell off and fried the board now this . this is the first time i have done a full test after the new motherboard was installed in the last few days.i paid 3,600 euro for this machine. the reason why im saying all this, is be very very carefull which company you by a computer from... thanks for any help on this problem. and yeh ive uninstalled the devices, and in safe mode. very tired best wishes zenno..

Have you checked the BIOS settings for DMA support ??

Enable DMA mode in XP: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devic... If you can't get all the drives to use a DMA mode, if a drive has been detected as producing too many data errors, after a certain threshold has been exceeded, Windows inserts settings in lines in your registry forcing that drive to use a lesser mode. In your case, Windows may have done this when you were having your fan and/or mboard problems, but it can also be caused by things such as a connector on a data cable for that drive was not seated all the way at some time, or a data cable was damaged and was later replaced, or the CD or DVD or Hard drive is having problems which isn't likely in such a recent computer. If the Windows software hasn't been reloaded from scratch since whatever error that caused Windows to limit the drive to lesser settings occurred, the drive will still be forced to use those lesser settings. In that case I can tell you how to edit lines in your registry so that you can enable the DMA mode the drive is capable of, but if the problem that caused Windows to detect excessive data errors has not been fixed, eventually Windows will force the drive to use a lesser mode again. Other things? If Windows doesn't have the proper info about the hard drive controllers, it may not be able to set the DMA modes for the drives properly. If you still have the original Dell software on this computer, it has the proper information about your mboard built into it, if the replacement mboard is the same as the original one. However, if the new mboard is different, you must load the drivers for the new mboard, so that Windows has all the proper info about the mboard, including it's hard drive controllers.

thanks for the reply ill get on to checking this now and report back later

i have done all that was said and even tried editing the registry to no avail.i even used a program called dmacheck to see if that could activate dma still no luck. cant find anything got to do with dma in the bios. dont want to do a factory install because i heard a lot of people say that it will still not fix the dma problem...

ok ive sorted this problem out all i had to do was go into the bios and scroll down to pata drives/ide and turn it on and the same with secondary ide pata drive turned that on as well and saved and rebooted and that was it thanks again for the help ZENNO...

well dosser you were right all along i just didnt realize it was in pata drive