My drive has vanished

[evilporter]

Got a Dell Dimension 8400 (p4 3ghz, 512mb ram, win xp with sp2)  and thought I'd throw in Samsung SH-W162C DVD/RW.
Got the drive in but the thing don't wanna know.  It flashes it's green light a bit too smugly, and won't open wide when I press the button.
additionally, When i get to my computer, the DVD drive doesn't appear.  I'm fairly sure it's there in system devices
And, when i turn the computer on, i get a message, Drive 4 not found: Parallel ATA, PATA-O (PRI IDE Master) (eh?) and I have to F1 to get into windows

I looked inside the box again, and double checked the IDE cables (the flat grey ones, right?) and there're ok as are the power cables.  I switched the DVDROM (which came with machine) from CS to slave and assigned the DVDR/W to master.  
The DVDROM is now my E: drive and my D: is blank.

Any ideas?

[GX1_Man]

Soome Dell's are very particular about needing all drives on CS. Your's may be one. You also have to go into the setup F2 and make sure it is seen there, before you can even expect it to work in Windows. If the drive doesn't open the power cable is not in correctly or it is a dead drive.

So let us know.

[evilporter]

I was wondering about CS, I was told it was outdated.
Could you walk me through the BIOS step?  I'm rather partial to avoiding BIOS like the plague unless I have someone to hold my hand  

[GX1_Man]

F2 when it boots. Arrow down to drives, and the ones present should be set to auto. The primary slave  (if there is only one hard drive) should be set to none. R arrow key to change the values.

[evilporter]

ok, got both CDrw and DVDrw set to CS

in bios -> drives,

drive 0 SATA - 0 is the hard drive and that's on
Drives 1-3 SATA 1-3 are all off
Drive 4 PATA - 0 (master) is on but drive ID unknown
Drive 5 PATA - 1 (slave) is off

do i turn Drive 4 to off?

[GX1_Man]

Try turning Drive 5 to ON. If there is an option for auto, you will probably have best luck with 4 andn 5 set to auto.