Bios Won't Recognize Third Device

I just built a computer, and I initially had
just one hard drive on the primary
(jumpers set to master) and a cdrw on
the secondary (jumpers set to cable select).

Everything worked just fine until I installed
a second hard drive on the primary (jumpers set to slave, and the main drive
set to master with slave present).
Then, the new hard drive was recognized
as D:/, but the cdrw was not recognized
at all (this is true in bios and windows)

I have set the jumpers on the cdrw to
cable select, master, slave, and unjumpered. I have also tried putting the
cdrw as a slave on the primary, and the
second hard drive as a master on the
secondary, all to no avail.

I know for a fact that the cdrw works,
because I used it to install windows.
I have made sure all plugs are in their
proper place, and everything is facing
the same way. I have set the bios to
auto detect on all devices, and still
no go.

One of the ways I set the devices, it
recognized the main drive and the cdrw,
but not the secondary hard drive.

If anybody can help me on this one, it
would be very much appreciated.

Hmm, sounds like some minor problem I suppose. I don't know what cable select is and I dont think you should be using it. I'm assuming you're using IDE bus. Theoretically, from what I've read, you should have your boot HD as Primary master. The CDRW should be primary slave and the other HD should be Secondary master. Now, on my system the cables don't work out that way and I have the second HD as Primary slave. It works fine. Ok, so you have your boot HD as Primary master and it works along with your second HD as primary slave. And you can get the CDRW to work. It sounds like your drives all work fine. The problem must be physical: The end of the IDE cable goes to the master and the middle connector goes to the slave. Make sure your cables connections are pushed in all the way. Make sure your jumpers are in the right positions. Make sure the power plugs are seated in all the way. You said all 4 IDE slots are set to auto in the BIOS. Check that you didn't bend any pins on your devices or MOBO.

still no go - I have made sure of the proper
connections, simply because the connections on
this computer are polarized - they only fit one way.

Can you try another cable. I've read (never experienced) that sometimes the cables are faulty or keyed upside down. (Reverse polarity)

k, well I set everything to cs, and it still didn't work, so I just installed a RAID
controller, hooked the cdrw up to that, and now it works just fine - I
still would like to know why the other didn't work like it was supposed to

The cd btw, is on the original cable, so
I guess that wasn't the problem either
(I installed another cdrom and it didn't work, so it wasn't a problem with the drive)
but at least it is all good now