Every time I try to enable DMA on Windows Me my system hangs in the middle of rebooting. I have 2 disks on the primary IDE. The IDE controller (intel 82371AB/EB) is ATA33 compatible and I have checked the hard disks using debug and they will run ATA33. I tried removing my soundblaster card but this made no difference. The BIOS is set to enable UDMA. Any ideas on how to resolve this problem would be appreciated!

Have you looked on the Intel site for updated drivers for the chipsets on you mother board. Normally these have to be installed before DMA will work. I would have expected the default drivers with Windows ME to have supported a board that old. One thing you said, the intel chips are ATA33 compatible, but do their spec.'s say UDMA 33 compatible, which is required. There is a differance between ATA33 and UDMA33.

Tried downloading drivers from the intel website but could not update as said that the chipset was already supported by my operating system. Also the controller does support UDMA 33 (my typo!) Any other ideas?

If you downloaded a self extracting exe from Intel - you can still force it to extract the individual files to a folder with the -A command line switch. You'll find it documented at the following URL: Installation Readme From that point you can manually update the drivers from Device Manager - Select the Hard Disk Controller entry and select Properties, Driver. Press the Update Driver button and point to the folder created above.

Thanks for your help chaps, but there still seems to be a problem. I have managed to get DMA working by editing the registry and reinstalling the hard drives (as suggested from Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article). This works fine until I try to apply UDMA in the bios. Then the boot hangs as before. Any more ideas?