Enabling DMA?

[realsquid]

I've got a Win98 machine with an IDE hard drive. I don't see anyplace within the properties for the hard disk controllers in the device manager to turn on DMA. The only place that I found mention of DMA is when I did properties for 'computer', but this just let me view which resources were using IRQ vs. DMA, but not change the setting. How can I change the setting, and how important is this setting?

Thanks.

dave.

[Digi Engineering]

It's absolutely vital that the IDE controller communicate with your IDE drives (especially if used for audio) via DMA rather than programmed IO (PIO). The fact that this setting isn't available in your properties dialog may be OK, in that it may mean that the IDE controller operates in DMA mode by default.

Alternately, some chipsets use a seperate utility to switch the IDE controller between DMA and PIO. Do you know which chipset is used on your motherboard?

Eric Day
DAE Engineer

BTW, the DMA mode setting for the IDE controller/drives is unrelated to the DMA channel information displayed in the "computer" properties dialog.

[realsquid]

I have the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset. After doing a bit of hunting, I discovered that yes, the default setting is DMA. Thanks for your help.

dave.