Bios won't recognize Drive

[nytpenguin]

I have an award bios on an Abit BX6 motherboard (sorry...I know it's old . I have two hard drives on the primary IDE channel that are recognized fine. I can't get anything to be recognized on the secondary channel.

When I boot in Linux, it picks up the type of the CD and recognizes it. When I boot in Windows, it also finds it. When I change the CD to master it tells me it finds it as master. I change it to slave, it tells me it finds it as slave. I take it out, it says it can't find the CD. When I put a hard drive on it, the bios still can't find it.

When the bios starts up, it tells me of the hard drives on the primary channel, but nothing on the slave. The IDE controller is turned on in the bios. I go through the auto-detect sequence and it finds the two drives on the primary channel fine, but nothing on the secondary channel. I tried a new cable too. The system works fine in that I can access my CD drive, but I can't boot from the CD and I have trouble getting a third hard drive on the secondary channel.

I'm pretty much at a loss over what to do except buy an ide controller card. Ideas