I'm sure that enabling DMA on drives should work on most computers with most drives. However, as we all know, each computer and its particular configuration and behavioral patterns is about as unique as a human being, and no two machines ever really behave exactly alike. On mine, I can enable DMA for my CDRW drive just fine. But when I try it for my specific DVD Writer drive, the whole thing goes on strike and refuses to show up for work. And in addition, in order to fix a problem caused by the simple click of a mouse, rather than just being able to "unclick" that option, I have to effectively employ an archaic DOS system recovery method that rolls my entire machine and all its settings to a state of several days earlier. Basically travel back in time to before I done went and pushed the Universe-Destroying-Infernal-Button-Of-Doom. Computers are just great. As for re-installing operating systems and formatting C drives, I'm way too stubborn to resort to such blanket solutions for mostly isolated problems. I don't like the idea of razing an entire city to the ground just because one traffic light bulb has burnt out.
I'm not too familiar with this problem, but I just wanted to ask a question. I noticed you said you had the drive as a slave in the beginning. Did you have another device on the same IDE cable that was a master? If so, what was it? That may have been the reason your computer got mad when you switched from slave to master. Having 2 devices as master on the same cable is a no-no.
I had a hard drive on the cable that was originally set as a master, but of course as soon as I switched the DVD writer to master I simultaneously changed the HD's jumper to slave. I never had both devices set to the same role at the same time, so that wasn't the problem. God help anyone who discovers the DOS scanreg/restore solution more than 5 days after encountering the orignal problem, since it only saves automatis registry backups for the past 5 days.
