drives (optical&hard drive) only have power when ide cable is unplugged

[[Cerberus]]

basicly the title says it all. i built my dad a new pc for christmas, i had everything shipped to me at school, and i assembled it, and installed xp on a drive i had laying aorund to make sure everyring worked alright.

so i bring it home, wrap it up and i go to put in the drive out of his old maching (40gig seagate) and a hp cd rw into it and turn it on. so it gets to the bios screen and doesn't recognize any of the ide stuff, and i go to exect the optical drive and nothing, no power no light nothin.

so i start messin with stuff, checking connections and such, i unplug the second optical drive i put in and see if it will work and nothing, but i noticed that the one i unplugged from the ide cable all of a sudden had power and ejected. so i did the same for the other drive and it ejected and had power.

i am wondering what caused this and what could be the problem?

these are the settings as they are now:

-jumpers to cable select
-ide channel 1 is hard drive channel two is optical drives
-one is a dvd rom, one is a hp cdrw
-cables were checked and can only go on one way
-power supply is working fine, since everything has power when the ide cable is unhooked


if anyone has had this probmem, or had different ideas on a cause and fix anything is welcome. i am just hoping it isn't the mobo, because when i installed windows the first time and it worked i threw the mobo box out.

[large_nostril]

I'd suggest setting the jumpers specifially (to Master or Slave, respectively) on the drives... Cable Select isn't as pretty as it should be all the time :\...

[wera]

Also try diffrent ide cables and cable select......well........sucks...really bad.

[wera]

Anyways i hope you get this to work before your dad gets it i really hope it works out .

[[Cerberus]]

so i threw in the hard drive i usd to test when i first built it, which had an install of xp on it, put the jumper back to master on the dvd rom and she started right up, found everything.

i havn't tried hooking up the hp cdrw and i might just take it back out, but talk about a weird issue.