PC Reboots Continuously After DMA Transfer Mode Enabled.

[Scott274]

One day when I started my PC, I got the "corrupt profile error" and windows automatically logged me on to a temporary profile. To resolve this problem I did a repair of my Windows (pressing R in setup) from the XP pro CD I have. This did solve the corrupt profile issue and I could log into my original profile.

But then I started noticing that my PC system was running very slowly. The reboot times of windows had increased, browser and other applications taking more time to start than before, unzipping compressed files (rar) taking a very long time to finish, etc. Even my mouse pointer started halting little by little sometimes as I moved it around.. Searched on google about this and found a likely cause.

I read that for some reasons, the system sometimes switches to PIO mode instead of DMA which causes the PC to work slowly. Looked into device manager > IDE/ATA controllers and found that the current transfer mode was set to PIO for both the primary and secondary channels even though "DMA if available" was selected.
I further read that this can be resolved by uninstalling the drivers in it's properties. The windows would then automatically pickup the drivers on restart and reinstall them, thereby switching to DMA mode. But when I did this and restarted, the system started rebooting again and again until I pressed F8 and selected "last good known configuration". The continuous rebooting stopped but the system was as slow as before with PIO mode back on.

Hadn't upgraded any hardware lately or even touched any of the internal CPU parts. It's just that till one day my PC was running fine and next day the problems started. CPU is running around 71C (Bios Temp), most likely because PIO mode puts a lot of load on the CPU. Will do a clean XP install later on but at the moment I would like some opinions as to why this is happening. Could this be a hardware or software issue.

System Info:
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 x86 Family, ~2411 Mhz (2.40GHz)
Dynet 512 MB RAM (System Properties shows 504 MB physical memory, 2.41GHz)
Harddisk: Seagate Barracuda IDE
HDDLifepro Monitor : http://i54.tinypic.com/25i2gi9.jpg
Motherboard: Gigabyte [Model 81845GVM-RZ (Rev:1.0)]
Product Page: GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 478 - 8I845GVM-RZ (rev. 1.0)
Conflicts/Sharing:
http://img200.imagevenue.com/img.php..._122_592lo.JPG

[arpanmukherjee1]

read : TweakXP.com - Problems enabling DMA on IDE drives

also try defragmenting the C:

[Goten]

Whenever problems like these occur to me....Its a hardware failure....Get ur friends hdd and do a fresh install on that....See if it works properly...If it does then ur hdd is corrupt.