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i have a mdt 60gb hard drive that was working correctly until last night. it will only work in pio mode and is slow as hell, it was working in udma 5 and was fast enough to burn a dvd @ 4x now it cant even burn right at 1x. the dvd turns out choppy. also it takes 22 mins for a hd to hd 4 gb data transfer. could this drive be ready to go south? i backed up the data thats on it and it seems ok and i replaced the hdd ribbon cable, that made no difference. i think its ready to take a crap but a second opinion would be appreciated.

Any strange noises from the hard drive? Clicking and clunking noises are the kiss of death.

While is could be a bad drive, issues with UDMA modes is usually related to controller problems.

Did anything change on your system prior to this happening? Install any motherboard or HDD controller driver updates or BIOS update? Install any new hardware?

You said you tried a different cable. Is this drive on a ribbon by itself, or with another drive. If it's sharing the ribbon try disconnecting the other drive it's sharing the ribbon with and see if that fixes the problem (you may need to re-jumper the drive as a Single Master or CS. Some drives have two different jumper settings for Single Master and Master With Slave.

I would also recommend you download the drive diagnostic software from the drive manufacturer's web site and run the full diagnostic test.

Hope this helps...

Sounds like a case of PIO fallback in Windows XP due to DMA errors. Check out http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/i ... /udma_fix/ for more information and a fix. The registry fix does work.

awesome!! it was the pio fall back thing, i used the fix and its all back to being speedy fyi fp i changed nothing and there were no noises. i think it was running on pio mode 1 cuz it took 2 hrs 40 mins to backup 22 gb. damn!!

Glad you solved it Shadow.

BUSBY: Interesting. That's the first time I've come across that issue. Thanks for the link. I'm putting it in my knowledgebase.

That's my first time reading about that too, but sure enough, mine was set in PIO mode also

When I used to rip DVDs more often I ran into similar issues with a generally slowdown in IDE performance. Upon checking many DVD ripping related message boards I came across one that had that information and it fixed my problems. I had a friend's HD do similar things and I couldn't figure out why. I forgot to even check that issue and once I checked it and found out about it the problem was solved.

ha mine did that toward the end of a 30 dvd rip marathon, i finished it tonight

Good tip! Question though...
If you are getting these fall backs, isn't a sign that you have a failing piece of hardware like your HD? And if you replace it with a new one, would those checksums be reset?

Checksums are tied to the IDE controller not the individual pieces of hardware. And no it doesn't necessarily mean failing hardware. In the case of optical drives, it could be a smudge on a disc or a bad block or something. DMA errors occur for different reasons and hardware is not always the cause. Or at least to the extent that I know.