Help meh!

[GDW]

Asus A7V255 MBoard
AMD XP 1600
GF4 4600
256 mg Ram
onboard sound card
Seagate ST320413A 20gig HD master & 3 parts
Maxtor 51536U3 15 gig HD (2yrs old) slave &1 part
Sony 52x CD drive
Memorex 24x CDR
Windows XP Prof


After buying BF1942 I was shocked to find that loading times were 5mins!!!. OK so I ve sussed that I need to upgrde ram to 512mg. But on inspection of my PC I decided that if I replaced my old 40pin IDE cable and replace it with an 80pin one it might just help a tad.

I also noticed that I had my 2 hardrives connected to the secondary IDE slot and not the primary so I swapped this round .

When I booted up It took twice the amount of time. Went to Device manager checked to see that both controllers were set to Ultra. But one device is set to PIO and cant be changed. Went to bios and made sure all was set up correct there ..no change.

3DMark is still 10.5k. So why does it take twice as long to boot/start a proggy etc etc etc . Im sure the Seagate is Ultra DMA its only 18 months old, and its the master drive.

BF 1942 now takes about 8mins to load FFS


Any ideas

Love and kisses

Grandad

 

[xane]

I was going to say check you are not running the disks in "DOS compatibility mode", but I'm not sure that problem exists in XP.

AFAIK, and not really sure on this, both drives on the same channel need to be UDMA for it to work, or it takes the lowest, try putting the older drive on the second channel.

 

[PR.]

I don't think there would be a DOS mode when XP has no DOS, but ya never know

Have you tried using one drive at a time?

 

[GDW]

Ohkay sorted. One of the pins on the Seagate had sheared off, hence Bios wasnt recognising it as UDMA. Surprised the little bugger still worked at all!!