Waitaminute.
If both your IDE drive and DVD drive are in PIO mode, that's a different matter.
Have you loaded the main chipset drivers for your mboard? If you haven't you likely will have problems getting them to go into or stay in a mode other than PIO.
Whenever you load Windows from scratch, you must load all the drivers for the mboard after Setup has finished, especially the main chipset drivers, so that Windows has all the proper drivers and information about your mboard. Your hard and optical drives are often not recognized properly if the main chipset drivers have not been loaded, and Windows will often set them to PIO mode in that case. Those drivers are on the CD that came with the mboard, but if you downloaded drivers from the mboard manufacturer's web site for your model, the main chipset drivers are often not listed there, and if they aren't you must get them from the web site of the manufacturer of the main chipset and load them.
If you're not certain the main chipset drivers have been loaded, or if those drivers have become corrupted, it does no harm to load them even if they have already been loaded and you don't have to un-install any existing main chipset drivers if they are already there.
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If you're absolutely sure you have loaded the main chipset drivers, you may be experiencing excessive data errors caused by other things that result in Windows downgrading the mode of the drives to PIO.
Are you certain all your hard and optical drives are connected to the proper 80 wire or 40 wire data cable? If they are all connected to 80 wire ones you're okay as far as that goes.
If you have unplugged any of your data cables since the drives last worked properly, it is common to damage them when you do that, especially 80 wire ones. Check the cables for damaged wires at the edges of the cable at all the connectors, including under the cable clamps. If in doubt install new or used and known to be good data cables.
Incompatible ram can cause memory errors.
Have you changed or added to the ram you have since the drives last worked properly?
Ram that works fine in another mboard will not necessarily work fine in yours.
Poor contact of your ram modules in their slots can cause errors reading the ram.
In any case, see response 2 in this - try cleaning the contacts on the ram modules.
http://www.computing.net/hardware/w...
AFTER you have done that, you could run a memory checking utility to check whether you are experiencing errors reading the ram.
Check your hard drive.
See the latter part of response 1 in this:
http://www.computing.net/windows95/...
