PIO only why no UDMA?

[Alex]

I have a Soyo kt333 dragon ultra platinum edition motherboard together with
an IBM Deskstar 120GXP hard drive ATA 100 capable connected with 80
conductor cable. I have not been able to achieve anything other than PIO
mode with a miserable performance of 2845 KB/s where I would expect udma
mode 5. I keep my system up to date with windows update as neccesary. I have
tried updating drivers, uninstalling bus mastering and ide channels and
reinstalling, all with no success. I have replaced the 80 conductor
connecting cable and tried the disk as master on the primary and secondary
ide channels and also as slave on the primary channel, all to no avail. I
also have cd rw and dvd rom drives connected and these are no problem
achieving udma mode 2 on any channels that I care to try them on. I have
scoured various news groups for help all with no success. Can anybody make
any further suggestions as I am just about out of ideas and despair of ever
correcting the situation. I would be very grateful if anybody could help me.

Thanks

Alex Blackburn

Operating system :Microsoft Windows XP Professional-5.1.2600

Motherboard: Soyo Dragon Ultra Platinum - VIA Technologies, Inc.,
VT8367-8233A

Processor :Athlon 2000+

Memory (RAM): 512K

 

[Lorne Smith]

Check in the event viewer for any IO errors. When XP detects too many IO
errors on an IDE controller, it will automatically switch into PIO mode
which is slower but less prone to read/write errors. The ONLY way to get it
back to UDMA mode is to delete the IDE control from the device manager and
reboot. It should then redetect the hardware and set it to UDMA mode for
you.

If you are getting lots of IO errors, it could be either the IDE controller
is faulty, or the drive is faulty, or your old cable was faulty, or one of
many other possible causes, even bad RAM can cause it...

Try as I've suggested and see if it works... If it changes to UDMA mode but
then drops back to PIO after a while, you have a hardware problem
somewhere...

HTH

Lorne

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Alex.

My two-year-old EPoX 8K3A+ mobo has a BIOS setting for UDMA vs. PIO. Is
there such a setting for your Soyo? It's a layer or two deep under
Integrated Peripherals in this Award BIOS. If this is set to PIO only, then
WinXP might not be allowed to override it.

I have
scoured various news groups for help all with no success.

Did you include this one? alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.soyo

RC

 

[Alex]

I have a Soyo kt333 dragon ultra platinum edition motherboard together

with


Thanks for the quick response. I should have mentioned that everything in
the bios checks out OK, also using AIDA32 Sysinfo tool (just discovered and
highly reccommended, available totally free at
http://www.aida32.hu/aida32.php) it would appear that the disk drive is
operating perfectly from with no errors, However I have just posted this
request to the group that R. C. W. mentioned and continue to live in hope


Thanks again
Alex