Well, I reset once more the bios to default, then went through and made sure it matched yours.. I changed all jumper settings to master /slave as required and same problem.
I pulled the battery and cleared cmos last night before trying my third bios flash and attached only my primary hard drive and one cdrom on initial boot. Then added second cdrom, all was fine (as was my initial setup for this computer). I then crossed my fingers and tried a second hard drive again and once more lost my cdrom's. disconnected my second hard drive and they came back. Switched hard drives same problem. Disconnected one cdrom and one of the two hard drives appeared with the one remaining cdrom. All this was done on first second and third bios flashes with default and modified settings
. I'm shutting her down for the night and pulling the battery again.. I'd go and buy a damn external firewire and forget it if it wasn't for the fact that this motherboard is supposed to be able to handle without any third party hardware 4 ide devices (with or without SATA devices attached as well). I just can't let it go without a fight!
I'll check in at morning time and hopefully the problem will be fixed, somehow I have a sinking feeling though...