Help? my WD 120Gb HDD is stuck at PIO mode only?

[William Cheng]

Hi all,

I have just noticed when I checked in the device manager that my primary
drive WD1200JB (which is UDMA5 capable) is only in PIO mode. The drop down
above it says DMA if possible, and I have checked the bios which UDMA5 is
automatically selected for this drive. I have used the Western Digital Diag
utilities to check the drive all seems to be functioning. I don't get it -
I am sure that when I upgraded my system 2 months ago that everything was
fine - I checked that all my drives were running at their proper I/O speeds.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks.

 

[William Cheng]

Should I reinstall the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers?

 

[NoNoBadDog!]

Are you using the proper cable? It should have three different colored
connectors;

Blue - motherboard
Black - Master
Gray - slave

Setting the jumpers on the drives to cable select and hooking them up in the
order above might help. If you are using an Intel based motherboard, you
may have to download and install the Intel Chipset Identifier and the Intel
Application Accelerator in order to have both drives function in UDMA5.

Bobby

 

[William Cheng]

Thanks,

I haven't cracked open my case yet - I thought it had all been working
before. I will try taking all the drives out but the PIO one and seeing if
that will do the trick - then try the colour coding and cable select.

I believe the Intel Application Accelerator only works with RAIDs - but I
could be wrong.

 

[William Cheng]

Found the solution in the MS Knowledge base:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH