Vista - Pioneer DVR-K17 - Cannot set to DMA mode

I have Vista Home Premium on an ACER Aspire 9410Z notebook. My DVD R/W device failed and I purchased a Pioneer DVR-K17 replacement which is a dual layer DVD R/W device. It appeared to install correctly and automatically under Vista.

I noticed a problem when I tried to play a DVD, it was stuttering. I went to the device manager and tried to set the drive to DMA mode, since it was in PIO. The settings will not "stick". It always reverts to PIO. I have tried to find a way into the BIOS of this notebook, but there is very limited access to any settings by hitting the F2 key just after powering up. I cannot see anything anywhere on the internet on how to make this work.

Any ideas on how to be able to enable DMA mode on this DVD device?

Is that drive OEM or the original Pioneer? Firmware is here for an OEM drive. I couldn't find the original firmware:

Download Pioneer DVR-K17YA SLIM 8X DVD-RW Firmware A03 Windows 2000/XP/Vista

Instructions are here:

Firmware DOWNLOAD : PIONEER CORPORATION

If the drive is OEM you need different drivers:

dvr-k17rs - from acer or acer oem
dvr-k17ra - acer
dvr-k17ya - dell oem
dvr-k17 - the original.

This site will help to set up DMA: Troubleshooting: Enabling/Checking DMA in Windows Vista, XP, 2000, Me, 9x - Club CDFreaks - Knowledge is Power

Thank you for the response. According to the packing slip that came with the drive it is a K17LA which is not one of the options you mentioned. I just removed and checked the device, it is indeed a DVR-K17LA which was made under license to Hewlett Packard.

I have attempted to set the device to DMA in the Device Manager. When got to ATA Channel 1 in the device manager and select the drive, the DMA option is greyed out.

I have deleted the device and the ATA channel it is on, rebooted windows , and the problem is still there after Windows re-installs them.

Any idea what I should do in that case?

Can you go into BIOS and change the channel the drive is on? Try changing it to UDMA2. If that doesn't work try the options here: Please Help: Vista DMA issue - Club CDFreaks - Knowledge is Power. Hope that helps. Is your drive SATA or IDE?

I have no idea, and I have searched for the answer, on how to get into what I consider the real BIOS on this notebook. One place mentioned that I need to open up the notebook and remove a jumper that will let me get at the BIOS where you can see the settings needed if I have the correct password. I have no idea why ACER made this so difficult.

Perhaps someone else has faced this issue of the "secret BIOS" before and knows how to access it?

I went through the link you posted in post number 4 above and it shows the exact same set of problems without resolution that I am facing. There are no checksum values to delete in the registry, I cannot get at a real bios, Deleting the items in the Harware manager just has them reinstall the way they were before. Very frustrating.

The DVD R/W is IDE. The hard drive is SATA.

If the drive is IDE, did you connect it to the main channel on the motherboard? It should be set to master. When the laptop boots look for an option to go to the BIOS, for me its Del.

The drive is in a laptop. I can only plug it into the drive bay location for the optical device. I don't have a choice on that. Also, as I mentioned, there is no "real access" to the BIOS on this laptop so I cannot check the device settings. I have not found any way to get at the real BIOS. It appears that ACER has made this inaccessible for the end user. I can only get to a very limited pseudo BIOS area on boot up that lets me set things like password protections, but does not have the typical section on hardware settings that most BIOS's have.