No Wondows XP boot with CD slaves connected

I can't get my machine to boot into Windows XP with my CD burner attached as a
slave.
Here's the scenario:
I replaced my Soyo P41S motherboard, which had 4 IDE channels, with an ASUS
P4V800-X, which contains only 2 IDE and 2 SATA connections.
My original setup contained 5 IDE devices - WD160 GB HDD on the primary channel,
a Sony CD-ROM and Lite-on CDRW on the secondary, a Lite-on DVD+RW on the third,
and a 100MB Zip Drive on the 4th channel. This layout was the result of much
experimentation to get all the devices to work.
Now, the ASUS board only has 2 IDE channels to work with, and I decided that
since I didn't use the ZIP drive all that much, I didn't install it in this
configuration. After doing a Repair install of XP and installing the MB and
chipset drivers, the machine won't boot up into Windows with the Sony CD reader
and CDRW connected to the secondary channel. It will boot up fine with just the
CD reader alone installed, but I get nada when the 2 devices are connected (as
master and slave, of course)on the secondary. I gave up installing the DVD
drive as slave on the primary channel at this time. I intend to replace the
EIDE HDD with a SATA to free up one of the channels. BIOS shows all devices as
installed but no Windows start joy.
My next plan of attack is to install an IDE controller card, use a SATA HDD as
my boot drive. install the original HDD on the primary MB IDE channel as
additional storage, place the CD reader on the second MB IDE channel, and attach
the burners to separate channels on the add-on card - all devices as masters on
their respective connections.
Will this work? And why didn't it work in the original configuration?

Tom Stearman

Don't take life seriously. No one gets out alive anyway.
.

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