picfreak

OK, first off I'm new here and have read through alot of the threads and answers posted here and felt right at home.

So here's my challenge for you guys cause I'm about 24 hours from turning my motherboard into an expensive frisbee

System is:

P4 2.4C Ht
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
ATI X800 Pro AGP 8x
(Secondary-running 3 monitors) Geforce 3 PCI
1.024mb DDR400 Ram
WD 120Gb 7200 w 8mb
2x LG DVD burner roms

Here's the problem, the stupid thing won't run more than 3 ide devices at any given time (only two if I try and hook up two hard drives).

With just one hard drive the machine recognizes 2 cdroms, if I try and attach a third it won't recognize it. I am trying to format and have alot of data to transfer so I tried using my backup harddrives (one at a time, ones WD 30Gb and one Maxtor 40gb). This is when I really started to notice the problems. I run, upgrade and modify 8 pc's at work without so much as a hitch. This has stumped me. As soon as I attached the 2 hard drives both my rom's disappeared. When I attached only one of them one rom disappeared. When I attached the other by itself no rom's seen. When I unattached one rom neither was seen. When I unattached both rom's will only recognize two harddrives.

Confusing sounding I know, but nothing has helped this maximum of 3 ide's at a time issue. These drives are not recognized in bios, hardware profiles, xp, nowhere.I had original version of Bios, upgraded to newest on net (forgot number, think it's 2.1), then downgraded to the .19 version. Nothing changed. Added and removed my maxtor PCI expansion card, nothing. changed all cables (i have a boxload), checked connections (the roms do flash and run on startup, just not recognized), tried moving everything from cable select to primary/slave etc, nothing. Everything has been tested in my old 700 system., all works fine with my old motherboard configured standard. I even went so far as to thinking maybe my power supply is being to pushed (460) so I disconnected my second video card, changed/removed my ram one strip at a time, i am even using a second power supply now to run fans and roms so all the default power is required for is motherboard, cpu, ram, videocard, and two hard drives.

I am seriously considering taking everything out and throwing this piece of junk as far as possible. Am I missing something? All newest drivers installed on my hardware, Norton anti-virsu 2005 runnung, spybot ran once a week, XP fully updated. Help!

Ryan