I discovered a problem when I ran CD Player, Media Player or Control Panal-Multimedia. Every time I loaded these programs on my friends computer it went to a dead halt. I blamed it on the mouse/keyboard and their connectors.
I spent 3 days trying to find the problem. I even did reinstallations of Windows 98 and 95 and the same problems occured and I checked BIOS. I tried to be observent to see exactly what was happenning by looking at what the programs had in common. I could not understand why Media player and CD Player would crash since was able to install any program I wanted from CD. Because of this reason i thought it could not be a CD ROM problem until I went into Control Panal-Multimedia. I browsed and wound up on the CD Music Tab. When I access the lever button it crashed and that's when I realized what the programs had in common. They all use the CD audio extension. I did not know how to remove any of the multimedia extensions and reinstall them because where they come from is not easy tracable since they come from different sources. I went to the Device Manager and looked at the CD Rom properties. I looked at the settings tab under options. Disconnect was on, Auto insert was on and DMA was on. I checked off Disconnect because it was only for SCSI drives. The CD Rom drive is not. I ran Media Player and it crashed again.
I was extremely fustrated at this point. I watched my computer reboot and read all the system info and messages that display at boot up. And that's when it finally hit me.
I remembered from another system that I put together, it supported Ultra DMA 33/66. I bought a 44x Cyber Drive many times but this one drive that I bought I specifically bought it because it said it supported UDMA 33. The CD Rom driver needed a parameter to enable UDMA. In the System info table it showed UDMA support at mode 2. I remember the DMA setting in the options check on. I rebooted the problem system an watched the system info. The BIOS reported that the CD ROM did support it. It would show up with that information because in the bios, the IDE MODE settings are set to AUTO detect. I did not have any information about the CD ROM supporting UDMA, my guess was the DMA option setting was causing the problem. I checked it off and restart Media Player. The system did not crash. I checked on DMA as a test to make sure it was that. And it crashed. The CD-ROM drive did not support UDMA or a parameter is required to activate UDMA(if so you would need to know the parameter used to enable it).
[This message has been edited by Ronald Evanicki (edited 10-12-1999).] | 
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