So I bought a hard drive and connected everything which was simple enough. Switched on the computer and windows xp recognises this and I format the drive.

So everything should be alright...right? Well, no, I noticed the performance of the drive was very slow when using it. A new 'Western Digital Caviar 180GB Special Edition 8MB Cache' should not should not perform like

http://www.neutrik.plus.com/pics/mark1.gif

So I went to check the Primary IDE channel settings and noticed that it was transferring data in PIO mode but I want to transfer it using UDMA. It was under 'DMA if available' and so apparently it isn't available. After some research I found out that Windows XP automatically downgrades the transfer mode to PIO if it gets errors. I've found out that this isn't an uncommon problem and I've tried the following solutions to try and make it work:

1. Uninstalled drivers for the Primary IDE channel and reinstalling them
2. Updated the BIOS
3. Changed the settings to transfer PIO only then changing it back to 'DMA if available'

None of the above worked so what else can I do now to make it work?

My setup is

Primary IDE Channel
Device 0 - 60GB hard drive (Transfer mode is UDMA Mode 5)
Device 1 - 180GB hard drive (Transfer mode is PIO Mode)

Secondary IDE
Device 0 - CD-Rewriter (Transfer mode is UDMA Mode 2)
Device 1 - DVD-ROM (Transfer mode is UDMA Mode 2)

Another thing that might be of interest is when I'm runnnig Western Digital's Data Lifeguard diagnostics utility, I get a

TEST COMPLETED WITH ELEMENT FAILUR DUE TO HANDLING
ERROR/STATUS CODE = 0008

I don't think its a memory issue either as I've got 512mb of ram which should be sufficient. It was my first time opening up a computer, and upgrading. Talk about bad luck.

I had a similar problem (in fact I went 6 months constantly uninstalling a hard drive when it reverted to PIO mode (as I’m sure you know it reinstalls and works for a while…5 errors reverts to PIO mode). I reformatted and switched the Hard drive round - I’m no expert so I’m not sure why, but it works fine now. As a said I’m no expert so it was just trail and error, a pain in the ***, but it worked!

I’ve actually got the same settings you have at the moment (hard drive’s on one channel, CDRW & DVD on the other) maybe you could try Hard Drive and CDRW on one channel etc… (That’s the setting that I thought coursed the problems for me, but maybe it’ll work for you. I always thought CDRW & DVD should not be on the same device?)

I know this isn’t of much use, but I’m just letting you know there’s someone else who had the same problem, and (somehow) managed to fix it.

I got this same problem, except it's my dvdr that's being read in PIO.