Disk overloaded means hd failure?

[dastott]

Hi

I have 4 hard disks in the PC, 3 of which are used only for downloading files and the other is the drive with the operating system (XP SP2) on it.

One of the drives I use exclusively for downloading hi def content and recently I have regularly been getting the dreaded "disk overloaded 100%" message. The LED light stays on constantly, utorrent stops seeding all active files and the PC almost locks up (to the point where it's difficult to even shut down utorrent). CPU usage rises to around 55%. It happens on versions 1.6, 1.7.1 and 1.7.2 (all the versions I have tried). This message only seems to appear when I download hi def stuff at high speeds (around 1mbs a second) onto this particular drive. The other drives seem to be unaffected. This PC is 2 years old, P4 3ghz with 3ghz RAM and I never had these problems until recently. I am using Avast, now with P2P shield disabled, but no firewall.

Is this impending hard drive failure?

Thanks for any help.

[DreadWingKnight]

Check your hard drive IDE channel advanced settings in device manager to make sure the drive "Current Transfer Mode" is not in PIO mode

[dastott]

Thanks for the advice. There are a few settings in IDE ATA /ATAPI controllers, including 2 Primary IDE Channels and 2 Secondary IDE Channels. Would it be Primary IDE Channel or Secondary IDE Channel? In the first Primary Channel Ultra DMA Mode 5 is selected for "Current Transfer Mode" for device 0 and for the second Primary IDE Channel PIO Mode is selected for device 1. Should I change PIO Mode to something else? How do I do this? This faulty (?) drive shares an IDE cable to the mobo with a DVD burner, and the DVD burner was installed first.

[DreadWingKnight]

Remove both IDE channels and restart.

That will cause the system to attempt to revert the drives to DMA mode.

[dastott]

Thanks for that. Sorry to be an idiot but I need to clarify this. Remove both Primary IDE channels? How? By physical unplugging them from the mobo or by disabling them in 'device usage' in properties/general? Thank you

Edited to add:

The first thing I tried was to is change the setting in device manger to PIO Only and reboot. Once the system came back up I then tried and change it back to DMA if available and reboot. That didn't work so then I uninstaled the IDE controller in device manager then rebooted and now it is back to normal again. Thanks a lot!!

[DreadWingKnight]

By right-clicking them in device manager and choosing uninstall.