Cant enable DMA on old K62 system win98se

[vapd]

Hi,
I'm having a bit of a clear out of my old PC gear. I found an old k62 400 and mobo in a case thats been sitting in a corner for several years. I decided to make it work and either sell it for £20 or if I cant get that for it then I'll give it away.

I found a suitable case for the thing and an old 12Gb Samsung Spinpoint HDD. 64Mb ram stick, ISA NIC and soundcards and an 8mb AGP (SiS 6326) graphics card. Used a floppy drive based install program from samsung to ready the hard drive and installed win98se. No problems. Installed everything else and the unofficial win98se service pack. Also installed VIA drivers for the MVP chipset, the ones VIA said were good for all MVP's. 4.34 I think they were, I can check this if necessary. Actually runs quite well! But although I was able to enable DMA for the CDROM it just wont enable for the HDD. I go to the relevant checkbox and tick it. Restart and when I go back to check: DMA is still not enabled. I am somewhat stumped on this one.

Any ideas?

[Agent]

With a system that old, you may need to enable it in the BIOS too!

[vapd]

Hi,
thanks for the input. I have had a look but cannot find anything that seems relevant in bios. Any ideas what I'm looking for?

[alsenior]

it might be that the system is not even capable of dma. i have system of that vintage here that has the same problem

[vapd]

Hi, thanks for the input alsenior. I think it is dma capable as the CDROM has this box ticked in the relevant win98 area. Also in the BIOS I have options for the various IDE channels: IDE Primary Master UDMA (for example) and then the option is auto or disable. Obviously they are all currently set to auto as they were at default. I think you maybe are thinking of older sckt7 chipsets which didnt have DMA. I have been told that some of them said they supported it but didnt but that VIA MVP's all did.

Anyway I've been looking thru the BIOS. When I use the IDE HDD auto detection it picks up the samsung as a 12GB drive and gives me 3 options. So far I've been only useing the default one this gives me: CYLS: 1662, HEAD: 255, PRECOMP: 0, LANDZ: 26492, Mode: LBA. The other 2 options I can take are Mode: Normal or Mode: Large. Some of the other values are different as well.

Any ideas on these settings?

[scrandman]

Try using the latest Hyperion drivers from VIA. Although optimised for later chipsets, they should be backwards compatible too. Make sure you tick the IDE related box during installation.

It sounds like everything in BIOS is OK. The other thing to check is that there isn't a jumper on the back of the hard drive forcing it to run in PIO mode.

[vapd]

Ah yes of course the drive may have a jumper. I'll have a look at that. Then try and either reinstall the current drivers or try newer ones as you suggest. I'll let you know how it goes.

[vapd]

Okay I have sussed it. Realiseing that the drive was ata66 and the mobo was ata33 I googled the drives serial number and found a hit to a util called sutil on samsung website. Booting to dos and useing this util I limited the drive to ata33 and hey presto the drive is now useing udma33. Better than PIO I hope!

[scrandman]

Good stuff!

Better than PIO I hope!

Depends which PIO mode it was running, but it may well be a bit faster (though ATA 33 ain't exactly speedy!)

[Agent]

A bit faster? It should be faster full stop due to the insane CPU overheads that come with PIO

Nice trouble shooting mate - Would have taken a while to spot that

[schmunk]

Ah, this thread makes me reminisce about my first PC (other than my parents') which I bought in 1999 - a K6-2 400 and a Voodoo3 2000!

[vapd]

Thanks all! It was the suggestion from scrandman that the drive may have a jumper for somthing like this (it didnt) that got me thinking about ata33/66. When I found the util and saw that it could set the udma I thought it would work... and it did! Yeah!

Now there is one further problem with the rig that I thought would go away when I had got everything sorted. But it is persisting. When I shutdown I get one long and 4 short beeps. Like a bios message. Only it dosnt happen on startup, just shutdown. It dosnt happen on a restart either. I've looked the code up even though it dosnt happen on startup and there dosnt seem to be a listing for it. Its an award bios. Any help on this particular issue would be welcome!

[scrandman]

Seem to recall there was an issue with Windows shutting down before all the hardware had done its necessary shutdown stuff. There was a hotfix issued. Unfortunately I've no recollection of whether or not this was XP or Win 2K as it was of that era.

To Agent - there are actually PIO modes (4 & 5 IIRC) that are faster that ATA 33, but I've no idea how CPU overhead figures in the whole equation though. Chances are ATA 33 will be better anyway as it is improved technology (although that doesn't always bring real-world improvements - SATA being a classic example).

[Agent]

To Agent - there are actually PIO modes (4 & 5 IIRC) that are faster that ATA 33, but I've no idea how CPU overhead figures in the whole equation though. Chances are ATA 33 will be better anyway as it is improved technology (although that doesn't always bring real-world improvements - SATA being a classic example).

ATA33 / ATA-4 / ATAPTI 4 / whatever you want to call it has a maximum theoretical limit of 33.3MB/s
PIO 4 & 5 has a maximum theoretical limit of 20 and 25 MB/s respectively (+higher CPU overheads)

Further more, PIO 4 & 5 is strictly for Compact Flash. It is not used for hard disks
There is no PIO protocol that is faster than ATA33.

[vapd]

Hi scrandman, the win98se unofficial service pack includes the shutdown patch, so it should be installed. I remember having to download it for a few PC's back in the 'old' days. Trouble is that I dont remember any of them beeping at me before or after I nstalled the patch. I will however try and find it and install it again, see if it helps....

[vapd]

Okay the shutdown patch isn't relevant. Its got to be something else, any ideas?