An oldie but a goodie - IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur

There is a handy registry setting that you can set, as long as you have XP SP2 or above, that will reset the error count once an I/O error recovers on the IDE chain. This is particularly handy for devices that like to get punted into PIO mode even though they are perfectly capable of doing DMA , 99.9% of the time. I need this for a dying hard drive that can perform DMA all day, as long as I don't go into the bad sector area where the head crashed in the past. If you're curious, this is also the same laptop that runs the ChickenCam, which is now viewable by clicking the "ChickenCam" link on the right side of the webpage.

The registry key for the IDE Primary Channel in question is a DWORD set to 1, at location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0001\ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess

Depending on how many IDE channels your system has, you may need to increment the key by one for each channel.

For instance, the next channel would be listed under key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0002\ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess

Read more about it here!

Hopefully, the ChickenCam will run marginally faster now. You can only torment a Pentium 2-333mhz chip so much with streaming video and routing packets.