Hard drives / DMA problem

[elmes]

I told my mate who's got a hardware problem that you guys are the best at sorting them out, here's his text:

Setup: AWARD BIOS 2.1, PIO set to 'AUTO'. UDMA enabled for all channels, AUTO enabled for all drive configurations, i.e no user configuration.
Gigabyte motherboard, GA-6BA with 440BX AGP chipset, 100Mhz FSB, 350-Mhz Pent2.

Primary IDE Master - 8.4Gb Western Digital Caviar, UDMA/33 supported
Primary IDE Slave - 13Gb Maxtor, UDMA/33 supported

Secondary IDE Master - 4.3Gb Samsung with UDMA/33 support, running Linux
Secondary IDE Slave - Hitachi 2500 DVD

128Mb Cube RAM,
Windows98 retail (not SE), defaults on installation to Intel BusMaster driver:

Problem:
The DMA check boxes for Primary Master and Primary Slave are unchecked, although both support DMA and UDMA. The DMA checkbox is checked for the Secondary Master, however. After checking DMA for all drives then rebooting, it defaults back to unchecked for the Primary master and slave.
Is there a valid hardware reason why this is happening.?
I understand there can be an 8.4Gb limit, and if a drive exceeds this, and is not the primary device, i.e the one from which boot occurs, then there are DMA issues. Not sure if this is crap or not...

[The PIT]

It maybe worth booting into safe mode and checking that you haven't got any multiple devices loaded under hard disk controllers and disk drives. If the devices pop up twice delete them both and let windows re-install them.
It's also possible that your hard drives on't like working together. The only way is to test this is to try enabling dma when theres only one drive connected.
Suppose it also maybe worth checking the cable.

[RAB]

The Samsung drive is probably the problem. I have one and have not been able to get it into UDMA mode. Every time I turn on DMA in device manger, my system completely crashes. Take it out and reset the Hitachi DVD jumpers to Master and see what happens.

Also, some DVD's are OK with DMA turned on and other don't like it. I'm not familliar with the Hitachi, but my Toshiba runs fine with it turned on. Experiment.

But I'm pretty sure that the Samsung is the problem. It was one of the first UDMA drives available and it was rushed to market before it was ready (how many times have we seen that? ). Even if its just in there to dual boot to Linux, its still being seen by Windows. If you want to leave it in the machine while you test, disconnect BOTH the power to it and the IDE ribbon cable. Unfortunately, Samsung's web site has no updated firmware for the drive.

RAB

I have Win98SE and still have problems with that drive.

[Gurm]

No no RAB, he said that the Secondary Master _WAS_ using DMA.

Here's the skinny:

1. Turn on DMA for the Hitachi DVD drive, you'll be happy you did, it's a kickass DVD drive, I'm sad I gave mine up but they don't make SCSI drives... 8-(

2. Once you've enabled DMA for the Hitachi you may, in fact, discover that RAB is right and the Samsung isn't 100% DMA compliant. No biggie, just yank the puppy or move it or something.

3. Western Digitals, especially from that "bigger than 6GB, smaller than 12GB" era, are notoriously picky about who they share with and how. If you haven't set the jumpers EXACTLY right you could wind up with both drives refusing to run properly. Make sure the WD is set to Master w/slave, NOT Master/Single or Standalone. Make sure the Maxtor is set to slave w/ATA master.

4. Try swapping the Maxtor and WD drives, that may just do what you want.

5. Make sure you have the absolute latest BIOS. Recent Award BIOS changes deal quite effectively with the 8.4GB limit, even on older motherboards. Not a problem there.

6. Updating to Win98SE will only help if there was an installation problem with Win98 or something came all unglued on you - in which case just a quick reinstall of Win98 (first edition) would do just as well.

Try all that, let us know.

- Gurm

[elmes]

Thanks, Do you think moving to Win98 SE would help matters?

Also he replies:
I am going to try and disable the slave drive on the primary IDE and see if that helps. If it does, I will swap the slave and primary drives over, so the 13Gb drive is booted from and see if that helps.
I would be really interested in finding out if there is anyone else on win98 retail who have a config where their slave drive is larger than 8.4Gb and DMA is no longer being shown as checked.

[The PIT]

Upgrading shouldn't make any differeance. Sometimes it sorts out obscure problems. It's woth checking the drives out first.