knock-on effects of win 98 reinstall

  • Thread starter Thread starter dobro
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dobro

dobro

Well-known member
I reinstalled Win 98 in order to solve one major problem, and of course now I'm having to tweak away a dozen smaller problems.

The biggest of the small problems is that it's now taking me five times as long to copy files from my D: drive to my C: drive. I used to be able to copy biggish audio files from one to the other in about 30 seconds. Now it takes three minutes.

Any ideas why the two drives aren't talking to each as well as before? I didn't touch the D: drive during the reinstall - just left it the way it was.
 
Your DMA settings probably got hosed.

Right Click My Computer / Properties / Device Manager / Disk Drives / Settings / DMA

Or, depending on your motherboard, you may have to install the driver for the ATA 100 controller. If you see anything that says 'pci mass storage device' with a question mark on it - find your motherboard disk and install the drivers for it.

Did you reinstall from scratch or overtop of itself?
 
Okay, I took a look at what you talked about and found that DMA wasn't enabled. So, despite the dire warning, I enabled it.

What's DMA, and why's it so important? This is a newbie question, right?
 
Yeah, that worked really well. Now everything's back to speed. My Cool Edit sessions are loading faster as well.

So, maybe I can answer my own question: DMA's a setting that's really important because when it's enabled everything runs faster and better.

Thanks Emeric, ditto RWhite.
 
DMA stands for Direct Memory Access.

In short, it allows data transfers directly to and from memory without using (and waiting for) an Interrupt.
 
Hmm... well, since Direct Memory Access works so well, what's the function of Interrupts, since it just slows things down?
 
Interrupts vs DMA

Interrupts (hardware anyway) make the microprocessor drop what it is doing and take care of the calling software's business, for example, pulling in data from the hard drive.

DMAs let the peripheral device just grab control of the transfer bus on its own, without involving or burdening the processor, and blast a ton of data in and out of memory.
 
And Interrupts pre-date DMA - in the old PC/AT days it didn't exist.
 
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