IDE devices not recognized or something more?

[forand]

Hello all,
Okay here is my situation, I recently bought a dual pentium pro system that I want to use for a firewall and webserver(very little bandwidth needed) but I have a problem: when I try and boot the machine doesn't recognize any IDE device that I put into it.
The details: they system is:
Rackmount
MB: ASUS P/I P65UPS (440fx chipset I think)
SCSI: AHA-3940UW
Video: Matrox MGA MIL/2bn
The system has never had IDE devices used in it before so I am not sure if the controller works at all but I have tried everything: cable orientation, position on cable, different devices, different cables, and secondary controller, in all the combinations I could think of. So my quesiton is: is there anyone wiser than I who may know about these types of systems that could give me a glimer of hope?
Thanks!

[endoalpha]

Im guessing your BIOS doesn't recognize the IDE device? Or is it your OS doesn't recognize the IDE device? What is this IDE device? A harddrive? 120floppy? cdrom?

[forand]

Yup my bios doesn't recognize it. I have tried two different CDROM drives and a harddrive, all I had in working systems in the past.

[forand]

Okay I figured it out: Since this was a new system I was not familar with the bios settings thus I was not aware that there were MULTIPLE places you could disable the IDE interface, which apparently had been shut off by the original owners. I restored the bios defaults and it found the CDROM so I looked through ALL the possible settings and found that in one of the THREE places you could turn off the IDE interface it had been turned off. Rather annoying, one would think that you would really only need one point to turn off the IDE interface. Thanks for your time.