"Hardware Interrupts" hogging CPU

[A_T]

Recently I used ImgBurn 2.1.0.0 and noticed that my CPU was dominated by "Hardware Interrupts" (as reported by Proccess Explorer) so that the burn would not exceed 2x and no other application could be used. After some investigation I found theat the IDE channel was set to PIO mode (I always have DMA enabled). The only way I could get DMA mode back was to uninstall the driver for that channel and restart Windows XP - then all was well. Today I fired up ImgBurn and again "Hardware Interrupts" swamped the CPU - sure enough PIO was enabled.

 

Something is changing the transfer mode on the IDE channel to PIO. Any ideas what is doing this?

 

Infotool results attached

InfoTool.txt

Edited January 28, 2007 by A_T

[LIGHTNING UK!]

It happens when you get a lot of read errors (or just errors in general) when working with the drive. Windows automatically steps down the speed until it finds one that works ok, or until it hits the lowest possible - PIO.

 

If you look in eventlog you might see some 'cdrom' entries where it complains about errors.

[A_T]

Thanks. From what you say I think it was probably transferring large files onto DVD-RAM that caused Windows to switch to PIO.

[A_T]

Just had an idea for a feature. Maybe ImgBurn could warn the user if the IDE channel is set to PIO mode before the burn starts?

Edited January 30, 2007 by A_T

[LIGHTNING UK!]

I don't know how to map my device listing to the info i need. In any case, if people don't already understand the causes behind the 100% cpu usage and max read/write of 2.0x, they probably wouldn't know what 'dma' meant anyway.