At the repair shop I used to work in...we once got a batch of multimedia kits with this problem.
(Back in the 486 days, the 1x/2x CD drives were usually connected to the sound card; IDE CD drives didn't exist yet)
The CD controller on the card didn't activate until the DOS driver for the sound card was loaded...and the drivers were on a CD-ROM.
*duhhhh*
Peryn: glad to hear you're up & running. Please hold a stopwatch and tell us how fast your machine boots off the SATA disk
