i was looking online and found some info that said certain Dell models came from the factory with PIO as default for the secondary drive, whichis my problem right now, it says you have to go into BIOS to set for DMA. How do i get into BIOS to fix this?
To get into the BIOS..shut down your PC. Push the "Power" button to boot it. while it is trying to boot, press the "Delete" key repeatedly and the BIOS will come up. I don't know what to tell you from there because I don't know what Motherboard the PC has (Most likely a proprietary Intel)or what BIOS Revison it has.
If you are comfortable working in the Registry, this will also work:
If you are not familiar with Registry Editing. LEAVE IT ALONE!
Run REGEDIT. Go to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
It has subkeys like 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. Normally 0001 is the primary IDE channel, 0002 the secondary, but other numbers can occur under certain circumstances. You have to go through these subkeys and check the DriverDesc value until you find the proper IDE channel.
Delete MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveIdDataChecksum, depending on whether the device in question is attached as master or slave, but it can't actually hurt to delete both. Reboot. The drive DMA capabilities will be redetected.
Note that many CD and DVD drives only use UDMA-2, because their data rate is much lower than that of a hard disk. This is normal and no reason to worry.
You can empty the content of these values. But you can also delete the values entirely. Windows will automatically recreate them anyway, with new content.
Open Device Manager again and check whether the device is now actually using DMA mode. If so, congratulations, you've made it (at least until the next time Windows disables DMA).