Sounds to me that maybe the jumper settings on the hard drive and the optical drive needed to be checked. IIRC, both drives are linked to the same IDE cable. Therefore, you could try and make sure that both drives are set to either "Cable Select" or "Master/Slave" combination. Remember, on those cables, the connector farthest away from the one that attaches to the logic board is considered Drive 0 or Master, and the one in the middle is Drive 1 or Slave. Try these suggestions and give a report back to the command post, soldier.

73s de Phreakout. b-)