Windows XP & DMA mode for CD/DVD Drives
25 June 04I had a problem burning to a dvd-r/dvd-rw media (I think it was a bad media, etc.) and the burn failed. And the nature of the failure was such that XP thought that the drive did not support DMA (maybe the drive reported DMA errors, or it locked up, etc., because of the media). Anyway, the result was XP turned off DMA mode and would only use PIO mode to access drive (which is slow & unreliable, burning wise, way to access the cd/dvd burner). To re-enable the DMA on this drive, I think one method is to physically unplug the drive , boot into windows once so it sees the drive is gone, shutdown and plug in the drive.
Or the other way, and much easier, is to modify the windows xp registry. Go to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\” and there should be several keys “0000”, “0001”, “0002”, and “0003”. Look under each one and delete “MasterIdDataChecksum” and “SlaveIdDataChecksum”. Reboot.
Found this info through a google search, but did not write down the exact source.