One of our readers has problems with a slow DVD drive in Windows 7. Let’s make it fly again! If Windows 7 does not even recognize your drive, get help here.

A DVD drive can become terribly slow when Windows 7 is switching the drive to PIO mode (an old, slow mode) and you DVD drive will then have a much slower transfer rate. DMA errors are often causing this switch, this can happen when a DVD has many scratches and the drive can’t read it. Windows is trying to use PIO mode as a last resort.

The easiest solution is to re-install the DVD drive, because this will wipe out the PIO mode registry keys and will assign DMA mode again. So, I highly recommend to just go into the Windows 7 device manager and uninstall the DVD drive:

Uninstall DVD Drive

1. Enter Device Manager into search field on Start menu.
2. Uncollapse DVD/CD-Rom drives
3. Right-click on your DVD drive and click on uninstall

4. Reboot

Fix Slow DVD drive via registry

0. Create a registry backup
1. Open the registry (enter regedit.exe into search field)
2. Uncollapse:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. You will find many subkeys, e.g. 001, 002, 003 and so on.
4. Look into each subfolder and check the value of the key DriverDesc until you find the name of your SATA/IDE Controller (more info below)

5. Delete the registry keys MasterIdDataChecksum” and “SlaveIdDataChecksum in the right pane.
6. Reboot

How to find the name of your SATA/Ide Controller?

Open up the Windows 7 device manager (enter device manager into the search field) and uncollapse IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers. The name of your SATA/IDE controller will be listed there. In my case it is called: AMD SATA Controller

If nothing works, I’d try to re-install the motherboard drivers, as well as the IDE controller drivers. Also make sure that all of your SATA/IDE cables are connected tightly!! (This is very important and can cause more problems than you think)

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