FYI - CD-ROMS and DMA

[Brangwen]

Fellow Members:

Interesting CD-ROM and DMA story. I have a fairly new Creative (Model # 5233E) CD-ROM. I believe it's 52X. In any event, I had checked on DMA in Settings, thinking all new (modern) CD-ROMs were DMA compliant. I was trying to access files on a database CD that I use for work. I was unable to access many files, cleaned CD, still problems. Fed up, I telephoned tech support of the database vendor & CD distributor. After trying several fixes, none of which worked, I disabled the DMA in Settings and the CD-ROM works better than it ever has.

Lesson: Just because the IDE component is of relatively modern manufacture, does not mean it will work with Direct Memory Access.

It's likely most of my learned colleagues know this, but for those members who do not, take note.

Have a good day!

Brangwen

[Brian48]

I had a similiar problem with my DVD-ROM and 52x Acer CDROM when I upgraded to my 8K7A+. UDMA was completely very dodgey. Burned CDs wouldn't read properly and DVD couldn't play at all when UDMA was enabled. Eventually fixed the problem by setting in the BIOS.

1. NONE for CMOS IDE HDD auto detect.
2. Set OS to plug&play
3. Set IDE2, where all my CD drives are installed in, to P10 mode.

Are removing the drives from Device Manager and letting the OS redetect them, everything Worked fine after that - under both Win98 and Win2k

Option #3 was not necessary to get it running in my DMA mode, however it did significantly lower (by a large margin) CPU usage whenever reading a disk. DVDs' running at 1x only use 1% CPU overhead now according CDSpeed99.

[jak]

yes anybody ever wonder why a huge cd burn wont burn, or if it freezes, well the solution i had was to turn off dma and bam burned like a charm.
another little fyi