Hard drive not running in Ultra DMA mode

[aronoffs]

I have XP Home on my Pentium 4 running at 2.4 ghz, 512 mb memory, 80g 7200 rpm Samsung hard drive.

According to my hard drive specifications, it is capable of using Ultra Dma. My problem is my hard drive is not running in Ultra DMA mode; not even DMA mode. It is using PIO.

When I look in the BIOS under Integrated Periferals, it shows the following:
IDE Primary Master PIO [Auto]
IDE Primary Slave PIO [Auto]
Primary Master UltraDMA [Auto]
Primary Slave UltraDMA [Auto]

When I look in the Device Manager for IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, it shows:
Primary IDE Channel Properties, Device 0:
Transfer Mode: DMA if available.
Current Transfer Mode: PIO

I've run a utility called InfoTools from Nero and it display's my configuration as: Samsung hard drive: DMA OFF.

Is there a way to switch the mode to DMA? For certain multi-media software products I have ( a music development program, video capture and edit program), which do a lot of disk I/O, the processing is rather slow, and I believe the logjam has to do with the hard drive. The video capture forum says that my hard drive needs to be running in Ultra DMA mode.

Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks.

[njovin]

Check your computer's BIOS setup to see if there are DMA setting there.

You usually access BIOS by hitting the delete key repeadetly when you first turn the machine on, but check your motherboard manual for details.

[wayneluu]

A suggestion for you,
Uninstall the Primary IDE Channel in IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers by right clicking on it and choose Uninstall
Reboot the computer so it will reinstall the driver automatically for Primary IDE Channel.
Check the properties again, choosing DMA if available, pressing Apply and then check it again to see if the DMA mode is on.

[aronoffs]

Thanks for your responses. I tried uninstalling the primary channel, rebooting and letting the device drivers be reinstalled, but I ended up in the same place as described in my initial post.

I don't suppose there are newer XP drivers. The driver version I have is 5.1.2600.1106 dated 7/1/2001. Do you have a newer version?

Is it possible my Samsung is not really Ultra DMA compatible?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.