CD on Primary IDE as Master a NO-GO

[TreeCutter]

I've got an A7M266 motherboard and I'm running my harddrives off a Promise FastTrak 100 in RAID 0 mode (each on a different IDE Channel). I have a Pioneer 116 DVD and a Plextor 12/10/32A CDRW. I can't get the BIOS to recognise either the DVD or the CDRW when connected to the primary IDE on the mobo as the master. Either are recognised fine on the secondary IDE on the mobo as the master. I've done enough swapping to know the drives are fine and the cables are fine. I can get both the DVD and the CDRW to work on the secondary mobo IDE when one is set to master and the other to slave, but this is really less than optimal since I have a whole IDE channel open and don't want to have the drives taking turns using the channels (particularly when move data from one to the other)! Tonight, I'm going to hook a hard drive to the primary IDE to see if it works at all.

My questions are:
Is this a problem in my mobo?
Is this a problem in all A7M266s?
Is this an A7M266 BIOS problem?
Is this an architectual restriction that I'm not aware of?

Thanks for any help.

[LPMiller]

actually, that promise controller does weird things like that. you might try the cd on the primary set to slave...I know it sounds funny, but sometimes it works.

[TreeCutter]

Thanks, I'll try that (connect as slave).

But just to be clear, I'm attaching the DVD and CD-RWs to the onboard IDE channels, not the Promise IDE channels. The Promise IDE channels have a hard drive each.

Thanks

[TreeCutter]

Well, I'm completely confused but happy I guess. I put an IDE harddisk on the primary mobo IDE as the master. It was recognized. I moved the DVD to primary IDE as the slave. It was recognized. I did the unthinkable and removed the harddrive from the primary IDE, but left the DVD as the slave. It was recognized. Why I tried the next step, I don't know because I had tried this several times before, I moved the DVD to the primary IDE as the master. It was recognized. THAT'S WHAT I WANTED IN THE FIRST PLACE! Now I have each device on it's own IDE channel with the harddrives on a RAID controller in a RAID 0 configuration.

Thanks for your help. I'm not sure what made it work but it's working and I'm happy (I guess - I really hate mysteries.)