DVD drive problem - DMA

Okay, first off, I did try everything I have knowledge of before I resorted to ask for help.

I recently built a new computer, everything works fine except for one thing, I can't enable Ultra DMA 4 on my DVD drive. (PIO transfer mode works fine.) When I enable it by having Windows uninstall and install my secondary IDE controller, explorer crashes and reverts to PIO. I checked the jumper setting on the DVD drive, it was set to master (It's the only DVD drive in this PC, and on the second IDE controller.)

There's nothing I can do, and burning/reading DVDs is really slow and makes everything lock up if I'm doing anything else ;_; Please help, and thanks for any replies.

My epeen (specs):
ASUS K8N-DL nForce 4 motherboard
Dual AMD Opteron 242
1GB ECC RAM
DVD drive - LITEON SHW-160P6S
GeForce 7300LE (If it matters...)

>Start troubleshooting. Rule everything you can out, then make an educated guess about the source.

I know that, I did everything I can to find the problem. I tried different cables, hard drives, DVD-ROM drives, advanced BIOS settings, DMA memory addresses I've messed with, etc.

>You know where all the components came from (or have at least a good guess).

I built it myself.


>You know that hard disk failure is probably not the culprit because it's new. Did you install Windows from scratch on it, or did you use some utility to move it from your old disk (like MaxBlast/dd/etc.)?

Multiple fresh Windows installs. No hard drive utilities besides my BIOS were used.

>Can you consistantly get your disk to register in the BIOS? Can you make it consistantly fail? If either is true, you found the cause. Try replacing the IDE cable. If that fixes it, you found the cause.

BIOS recognizes it fine, even showed that DMA was enabled, it was just DMA in Windows.

>Try removing one stick of RAM and see if the problem happens still. If so, take it out and try the other. If still, try one stick in the other DDR channel or another slot. If that still doesn't fix it, you ruled out a RAM error too.

Not worth it, besides, I did memtest, said everything was fine.

>Remove all PCI cards but the graphics. Remove all other disk drives. If this doesn't fix it, you've ruled out the possibility of a power drought (not enough power from the power supply causes brownouts that show this kind of behaviour).

I had no PCI cards in when I tested it.

>Try anything else reasonable you can think of. If all else fails, you have a bad IDE channel on the motherboard. In that case, you need a new motherboard.

Bad IDE channel, causes CRC errors while in DMA transfer mode. Not a problem, since I'm using my storage hard drives in PIO mode, which don't need performance. I hardly notice a difference, too.