I have an ATI 9700AIW video card. When I started up the TV tuner just now a messege popped up saying the following :

Personal Video Recorder and TV on Demand performance will be degraded on this system as DMA for the hard disk is not enabled. PLease check the system settings in the windows COnrtol Panel for the following devices. And it lists both of my hard drives.

My question is how do I enable DMA? Could it be a problem with my hard disk drivers(running 2 Seagate 80Gb drives)? I don't want to start fooling around with the drivers unless that is the most likely fix. Any input is appreciated.

which OS?

WIn XP.

See this old post for how to enable DMA in 2000. It's the same in XP.

I Checked it out and both drives seem to already have DMA enabled. I finally have a need to use the PVR capabilities that the ATI card has and it seems to be giving me even more problems. As a test run, I recorded an episode of Married with Children...Well It recorded it but with no sound. It has sound when I am watching it as it is recording but not upon playback. So the reason I bring this up is, do you think the sound problem could be related to the DMA settings?

There's a place in the settings to choose the source. First make sure that the 1/8" minijack cable from the video card (the one bundled with the video out cables) is going into the line in on the soundcard, then make sure that the line in is chosen in the ATI settings to be the audio source. It might also help to check if line in is the recording source in Windows. I'm not sure if the ATI software cares about that, but it's worth a shot.