I had a similar experience with my mobo not recognizing an Acer cdrw that I replaced my dvd drive with. I thought that my ide channel was busted, tried pnp in the bios, no cd-rom recognized. Then I remembered reading somewhere that I needed to upgrade my firmware to a later version. Try that. I've since taken out the cdrw and put the dvd-rom back in. Computer recognises it no problem. Must be outdated firmware or something. For the hdd, try a floppy drive utility.