BleepingComputer.com: Disappearing drives

I have had a problem with my dvd and cdr becoming inoperative,they do not show up in the bios or my computer. The hd light stays red when this occurs. When it first started , I would trouble shoot the drives and cables then put the HD in another machine and format it,put it back in my machine and reinstall everything.This I did more then a few times. The last three times it occurred I fixed it by running spybot and ad-aware and pest patrol which cleaned out alot of spyware. The next fix was to simply let it sit off overnight after the above utilities found nothing. Now the cd drives are not recognized and I have disconnected them which has turned off the HD light. Before I reformat again I was wondering if anyone has a suggestion? Restore don`t solve the problem.
rlf

Do you have a cd-rom and a hard drive on the same IDE cable? I did this when I didn't know any better and the bios didn't find a hard drive to boot from. Also, make sure your drive's jumpers are set appropriately and on that the are on the right IDE connector(slave is the middle connector).

Master/slave needs to be set for each drive, one of each. Most hard drives are setup differently, so slave is not always in the same position.
If you can see the drives once in a while, it's not a jumpering issue, probably software related (viral/spyware) or a drive is actually failing.

Try swapping them out with known good parts and see what happens.

The best thing to do with all drives let it be Hard drives or dvd cd drives is take the jumpers completely off! This way they all become cable select. But never connect a hard drive to a cd rom. A cd rom is usally ata 66 which will slow your hd down to a crawl. The old saying holds true here your only as fast as your slowest ware

Quote

If I am not mistaken the board has to support cable select for cable select to work
Such as dell
What board ?