Yes. In my BIOS, it's set to "auto" (2 choices here: auto or disabled) and when I check in my manager, for ATA-ATAPI IDE controlers, it's set to "DMA if available" (or something like that but the other choice is not related to DMA enabling at all; Pio thing).
I really can't see what causes this.
I think the next step is dismantelling all my cards in the case and reinserting those one by one, letting XP look for drivers/controlers and rebooting each time for each card. Yuk... I really didn't expect this when I "upgraded".

It's good that it is set to "DMA if avialable". However, is it available?

Yep. It says "Ultra DMA mode 4" in main (primary? I got to translate...) IDE and "Ultra DMA mode 2" in secondary IDE.

Hi,

I was having a similar problem and it turned out to be my firewire card. Might check into that as you stated. Remove from device manager, turn system off. Take it out. Restart system. Shut down again and put card back in.

Why it happened and why this fixed it, I don't know, but it did!!

Good luck.

Galen

I tink I'll be doing that tomorrow.
Last thing I did was change the driver of my ADS Tech Pyro 1394 DV card. It had the Texas Instruments driver installed and I swapped it for the Windows OHCI compliant driver... with no success. 30 frames dropped on a 5;29 sec capture.
Enough for today.
At least, when I find the solution, I guess my system will be *very* a-ok with all these twists'n'tweaks I'm doin right now!

Problem fixed! I got the driver out, then the 1394 card and re-installed card+driver.
More: I changed the capture drive, reset my cam from zero and everything worked.
Seems to me that I was using a drive that contained other programs: BIG mistake.
You gotta use a drive that's REALLY dedicated to capture; no program, no OS, no nothing on it except video...
Now, I learned a *detail* the hard way...
Thanks a lot guys for your replies.

How many times has it been said you should capture to a drive NOT the root drive?

LOL!

Anyways...

Many of you have/will be getting one of the newer IDE 133 drives. They almost always come with their own interface card, or you need to buy such a card. Do NOT SKIP doing this! While these drives will run at lower speed, you defeat the whole point of having a fast drive if you don't use the faster IDE controller build into the card that comes with the drives. Some newer motherboards have a build in 133 interface too.

Since I swap drives all the time in drawers I use messages flash by indicating why the seperate IDE controller is doing depending on what drive is currently in the ssytem. The newer 133 IDE drives on their own controller should run at Mod 6 or is it 7 I forget. Not the much slower Mod 4 or less. They simply overall their own BIOS before Windows gets mounted and then they really fly along. When my system isn't doing much else I've seen files in the 400-500 MB range get copied from one drive to another in under a minute. Now that's fast!

Yeah, I got carried away by the fact that one of my drives crashed so I changed it for a 80Go drive (instead of the 20Go that died) and decided that since I got so much space now, I could store video on this one. BUT, I also put all my programs on this new drive, different from the one containing my OS (XP).
Boing!...no good. Apps and video on the same drive don't blend very well.
God, one WHOLE day trying to fix it to finally read the manual again only to realise what I did. And in the process, I played with my camera presets cause at one point, VidCap didn't "see" it anymore. I had to reset it with one of those "holed switches" you activate with a pen tip.
Allelluiah, now I can go back to editing.