No its not going to hurt the drive using DMA. If your drive can't handle DMA or errors then XP will reset it back to PIO mode. You'll be in for some long reading & burning if its PIO mode.
If your drive is old it may not even use DMA....???
To use UDMA go into your bios and make sure DMA is enabled. Go to Device Manager and click on IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, right click on Primary IDE channel> properties> Advanced Setting and in the pull down (transfer mode) select "DMA if available". Do the same thing on the secondary IDE channel and reboot.
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