Reset DMA by Uninstalling Driver, Now Computer Starts Is Very Slow

[myluna]

Hello everyone! Question from a newbie:

First, thank you for all the wonderful information and help that is on this site. It's been wonderful and educational. Thank you all.

I am having a problem with my computer and hope you all could help me. It took me over six hours to rip, shrink and burn a DVD tonight so I took a look at my DMA status and decided to reset it. I uninstalled the driver and rebooted my computer. Now when I restart my computer, it takes much longer to start up, usually getting stuck on the Windows screen and Welcome screen for 3-5 minutes or longer each time. Before I uninstalled the driver, my computer booted up in about two minutes total.

I guess what I am wondering is if I did something extremely wrong and somehow damaged my computer. And is there anyway to fix this problem?

I'd appreciate any help and advice you could give.

Thanks,
Myluna

[soup]

Can you explain exactly what you did?

[Chewy]

You should only remove the controller, not remove the driver when trying to
fix dma problems

you might need to run a system restore with xp or reload the driver

also possible your boot hard drive is now running in pio mode

[myluna]

Soup -

I followed the steps in the sticky How to Check DMA Status and Restore. I opened the properties for Primary IDE Channel and checked the status under the Advanced Settings tab. Then I clicked the Driver tab and Uninstalled the driver. I clicked "yes" to restart the computer. When my PC started up again (it took about 10 minutes to open) I got the balloon saying "New Hardware Detected" and to reboot to finish installing. So I rebooted again and it took another 10 minutes to start up. I checked the DMA Status for the Primary IDE channel and it is set at "DMA if available" and "Ultra DMA Mode 2".

Chewy -

When I click on System Restore, I get an error report message saying "System Restore Application has encountered a problem and needs to close." When I tried to open the System Restore tab in System Properties, I get a message that says "An exception occurred while trying to run "shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL".

Could you tell me how to check the boot hard drive to see if it is running in pio mode? How do I find out which is my boot hard drive?

Thanks guys for trying to help me out here. Hope I'm not being too confusing when I try to explan what's happening.

[Chewy]

make and model of the computer?

[myluna]

My PC is a Dell Dimension XPS T800R. BIOS Version A09. OS is Windows XP Professional.

[Chewy]

http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm

might want to run xp as a repair disk, hopefully you didn't install a bunch of weird drivers on that older computer, windows xp should have had most everything?

[myluna]

I decided to try defragging my computer and that seemed to help. It's starting like normal (pretty much) now.

Thanks for your advice and help! I think I'll go head and check out your link just to be on the safe side.

[Chewy]

best thing to do with a single large partition(drive) is too remove as much data as possible(backup) and then defrag.