P5E3 Deluxe not recognising drives

[Amanensia]

Hi,

I'm building a semi-new PC using a mixture of new and old components. The new components are a P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, an Intel Q6700 processor and new DDR3 RAM, plus a new 400GB WD Caviar SATA drive.

The old (working) components are a couple of DVD drives, a beefy PSU (Antec 850W) and a GeForce 8800GTX video card.

On connecting everything up, the BIOS is not recognising either of the DVD drives (which are connected to the PRI_EIDE controller) or the hard drive (connected to the SATA-1 controller). The hard drive is as yet unformatted. There is definitely power to the DVD drives as they light up on powerup, but the system is not recognising any connected drives at all, and within the BIOS there is nothing detected. I can't even open the DVD drawers.

I have tried connecting just one or the other DVD drives. These drives were used previously in another machine and functioned fine. I have tried changing the master/slave settings around, and I have tried each of the DVD drives on their own without the other one connected, but nothing has helped, and neither those nor the hard drive are being picked up.

I'm out of ideas. Anything I might have missed?

[Kov-Ice]

Possibly try a different ribbon cable for the optical drives. Try changing both the Cable Select (CS) rather than master or slave.

On this mobo, have the SATA drivers been installed?

[Amanensia]

I've tried two different ribbons, no joy.

I have no idea if the SATA drivers have been installed - the motherboard is clean out of the box today. I can't install anything though, as I can't use either the optical or hard drives!

[Dia]

I would take all three non working components out and test them in the other machine. If they work I would then take the known working device from the old machine and try them in the new machine. If bios doesnt detect either set of optical drives and hd's then there is something wrong with either the connectors your using on the board (try a different pata and sata connector), the bios is not operating properly try installing a floppy drive and flash the bios to a newer version, if none of that works call it a dead board and get a new one.

[Amanensia]

OK it gets worse.

I took one of the optical drives and tried it in the old machine, where it worked fine. I couldn't try the hard drive in the old machine as it only has a new-style power connection. However I plugged the hard drive from the old machine (known to be working) into the new one to see if that would be recognised. Not only was it not recognised, the hard drive immediately (and quite loudly) blew up. So now my old machine is also dead and I've lost heaps of data (now is NOT the time for a lecture on backup procedures, please!)

Before I plugged in the hard drive I tested the voltage across the power connector using a voltmeter and got +12V and +5V as expected, so I have no idea why the drive blew up, but it can't be a coincidence that it blew immediately I plugged it into this new build from hell.

Open to any more ideas before I jump off a cliff.