Wanna make sure everything is OK with my 2nd HD install

Question

I have a Dimension E310 that I bought a few months back and recently I've decided I wanted to put my old PC's HD in as a second drive. Here is a link to the drive that I addded: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,579,00.html My PC does recognize the drive and I have been able to save data to it. But I've noticed a few things kinda 'odd'. For starters when I start up my PC I get a message saying something to the effect 'the computer doesn't recognize drive 2 and 3'. Something to that effect. I don't know 100% but I can reboot and find out exactly if needed. It asks me to press F2 or F12 also. Another thing is my computer seems to get a bit sluggish at certains when I would access the 2nd drive. For instance I was playing some music and copying files over to the 2nd drive. Small files. Maybe 5MB. When it was in the process of copying over all of sudden my music start skipping and scratching to the point that I had to restart iTunes. I then copied/pasted the same data to the original HD with music playing and nothing happen. Also I've been slowly backing up some DVDs/CDs I own and ripping them to my computer. I recently reformatted my PC and before had I was able to rip full DVDs in under 20 mins. Now it takes over an hour. Someone mentioned to me about PIO/DMA mode but I can't get the burner in DMA mode for the life of me. I was told it had to do with having the drive on the same IDE cable. I don't know if I have the jumpers set right or if I have the right ribbon part in each drive. I know this is an EXTREME amount of stuff I'm asking but if someone could tackle one thing and someone else another, man, I'd really appreciate it. I've tried so much and just can't get this PC running how I want. It was running fine before I reformatted and tried to install the 2nd drive but now like I said my burning is slower than ever and the 2nd HD acting weird.

DELL-Donald K · Answer

in bios, turn of the SATA controllers that don't have any drives attached, it appears that you have them all on.

for the DMA issue, download this file to the desktop then run it (It is fast) it should set DMA on you secondary IDE channel

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R53986&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=63977

Storage, Drives & Media

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