DMA Check brought PC to it's knees.

[Sterling_Aug]

You could try deleting the drive in Device Manager and then rebooting. It should pick up the drive again, but not with the DMA checked. DMA is only used on the newer drives that include that option. You have obviosly learned the hard way that your drive deos NOT include DMA.

[BFlurie]

This might work. In safe mode, type in Start/ Run:
Regedit

Now use Regedit's find function & search for this line:
DMACurrentlyUsed

Look at what it finds & try to figure which entry(s) is under your hard drive(s). Then set the value to zero, like:
DMACurrentlyUsed=0

Reboot

[Jim Maynard]

I recently attended a PC course and was advised of the performance increase of checking the DMA box under hard drive properties, in control panel devices. Having done this I can now only boot into safe mode, which will not allow me to uncheck DMA. I don't want to lose the content of the hard drive but I do not know what I can do. Yes, it's windows 98. Somebody please help.

[Beemers]

Can you go into DOS-Mode?
If so then at the prompt type scanreg /restore and pick a date previous to your delema and hit enter. When you get to the dos prompt after the previous date has been restored, type win and you will be wisked into windows.

[U-96]

DMA can also screw up your drive if you are overclocking the PCI bus at exotic speeds.
I enabled DMA once on a modern Seagate UDMA66 drive when it was at 41.5MHz and poof! no startup, no recover, blah reformat, reinstall Windows etc...

[blondini]

turn off udma or set the controller to piomode 4 or less in the bios then it should boot up with dma ticked then just untick it

[Beemers]

Check out this site. http://www.windows-help.net/windows98/tune-35.shtml

[Brangwen]

Beemers:

I've never seen that site before. Thx. At first glance it seems rather informative...

Have you tried the DMA "testing" prescribed there?

Thx! Brangwen http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif