Hi all,

I'm at my wits end here, as I have been stuck with this issues for almost a month now and am running out of ideas. Essentially in a nutshell the problem is that if I connect either of my 2 Sata DVD drives, the system won't POST.

I'm running stock everything currently with the F3 bios, I've tried updating and it made no difference. I have the original Sata DVD which I had working with this system for the best part of a year, and also a new one I purchased to test to see if it was drive related. Both cause the issue:

During POST it says, "Detecting IDE Drives" and one of several things will happen:
1) It will hang with no drives detected.
2) It will hang with only my SSD and HDD detected.
3) It will hang with all drives detected including the DVD.
4) It will print weird "L" characters after it detects the DVD on each line, indented by 1 character each time - so it looks like a staircase made from "L"s. This has only happened a half dozen times, and only with the new 'test' drive.
5) It will boot to Windows7 64bit, I will see the drive in Windows Explorer, and then it will vanish.

That's it.

My specs:
Gigabyte P67A-UD5
8GB GSkill RAM
2xHD 5770 GPUs
Zalman 850W PSU
OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD
Seagate 1TB HDD

I've tried all combinations of Sata ports, and cables.
I've given the drive it's own rail and power cable.
I've played around with about as many bios settings as there are available to do with the ports, Sata modes and so forth.
I've checked all cables, removed all hardware, and still no dice.

I'm essentially starting to consider that it may be the motherboard... which is painful to replace. :| Has anyone had this before? It's driving me insane, as POST errors don't really give you much to go on, other than "Something is wrong."