Alright so a while back i cleaned out my pc of dust b/c it was getting really dirty. Plugged everything back in turned it on and was greeted by a black screen. Rechecked everything again black screen. I did this 3x more times just to be sure. Finally i just left and after maybe 1-2minutes the windows loading thing showed up. I was happy to see it working but it wasn't that simple. When i was in windows i checked something on the net and then wanted to play a game. For some reason it was incredibly sluggish, the video was jittery and the audio was skipping like made. Anyway after 3 months i found the problem but so far i don't know how to solve it. My Main HDD keeps going back to PIO mode instead of DMA. I tried changing some stuff in the registry, uninstalling, updating drivers,and putting windows on a different drive. None of this has helped. Upon every boot i get 10 Atapi Errors "9" followed by 1 Atapi Error "11" and then 4 more Atapi Errors "9". The only thing i can think of doing is putting linux and dual booting it with XP to see if maybe theres some incredibly glitch in XP thats causing this.

OMG, you've been trying to diagnose this for over 3 months? What exactly did you remove from the case for cleaning? It sounds to me like you got the cabling messed up. BTW, you really need more RAM.

some computers have settings in the BIOS for PIO/DMA modes. Have a look there to see if anything needs altering

Well yeah because no one could figure out what the problem was.. Even posted here. I cleaned out the entire pc, only not removing the mobo. The cabling is fine. I even put a different cable in to see if that was the problem. No Luck. The BIOS is fine too. Shows the right cable and settings. PIO is set to mode 4 and DMA is set to........ I'm not sure right now but i know its fine, because i checked it couple of days ago. The ram is fine since i only run a firewall in the background. I have another pc for more intensive tasks and games.

Have you tried setting PIO mode to Auto in the BIOS instead ? Why mode 4 ?

Yes,everything was originally on auto. So i thought i try and set it on 4. I'll reset everything on auto and see if it helps. This problem is just driving me mad.

Tried it. Still no luck. I was wondering if there was some way to tell windows not to lower the speed of the drive after 6 errors but instead maybe after 20 or so.