The weather forecast calls for interrupt storms...

October 15, 2006 10:01 AM

Help! I added an internal IDE hard drive to my late-model Dell desktop, and accessing it pins my processor!

I've got a Dell XPS 400 with Windows XP MCE. Because the computer's main internal drive bus is serial ATA, I attached a plain old Maxtor IDE to the computer via a PATA interface designed for a removable drive.

Now, whenever I access files on the drive, one of the processor cores pins at 100% utilization, my desktop becomes rather unresponsive, and file access takes *forever*. I suspect there's some sort of "interrupt storm" going on.

So... what is wrong, and how can I fix it?

posted by perissodactyl to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

probably no dma on that controller. in the hardware tree in system you should be able to look at the properties for that controller and see if you can enable DMA.
posted by joeblough at 10:13 AM on October 15, 2006

Ditto joeblough. I've experienced the same problem. Be aware that DMA may also need to be toggled on/off in BIOS.
posted by datacenter refugee at 10:43 AM on October 15, 2006

Ditto both of them, plus if you've enabled DMA in both the BIOS and Windows but it still doggedly sticks to PIO, try the ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess trick detailed in KB817472:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472
posted by BobInce at 7:14 PM on October 15, 2006

Another thing to consider: is the drive cabled as a master, or is the drive set to cable select?

Dell normally uses cable select in the systems it ships, and their motherboards seem to behave better with CS. Check your jumpers.
posted by rachelpapers at 8:25 AM on October 18, 2006