hard drive dma problem

[Tommy Boomfiger]

a friend of mine has a problem with a new dell western digital WD1200JB drive. his mobo supports UDMA100 and has a 14.x gb UDMA66 WD HD running properly. the new drive is only running at multi-word DMA mode 2, which gives the same throughput as PIO mode, 16.6 MB/s max. the 14gb drive is set to master right now until he has time to do a complete new install and is probably going to use the smaller drive to install winxp and use the larger one for data storage and whatever. also whenever he tries to format in xp pro, the first time it will say that it cant be formatted because drive is in use, but the second time it works fine. right now the 120gb is on the end of the cable and the 14gb is in the middle. i always forget which connector is for master and which is for slave, but he has tried it in both configurations.
i also noticed while i was working on the hd's, his cd drives were also in MW-DMA m2. is this correct?
the only thing i can think of is that the cables are messed up, i know both cables are at least UDMA66 capable
any ideas?

[Tommy Boomfiger]

i just fixed the HD, apparently the bios wasnt automatically auto detecting. strange, it was set to auto, but didnt see it until i went into the bios and reselected auto detect and pressed enter.

but im still wondering if the cd drives are supposed to be set at MW-DMA m2?