Boot order strangeness - system will not come up w/o 2nd HDD

Using my old WinME 1gHz P3 system w/256 mB RAM and two IDE hard drives as an internet machine these days, but I've run into an oddity in the boot sequence. Fired it up today and started hearing death-clicky noises, along with a 'check cabling' error - tore it apart and isolated said death-click to the slave HD. A little troubleshooting with a known good HD netted the following:

- The system will not boot singleton. No matter what position on the cable, the master HD alone will not boot; it freezes at the BIOS screen.

- Was able to get it to boot -once- with the old (dud) slave HD; Windows recognized it as D:\ and let me open the drive, but trying to access any files froze the system irrevocably.

- Able to boot repeatedly and normally with a known good HD in place on the slave end of the cable, however Windows does not show it available as a drive. This I may suspect to be a jumper issue - I'll have to double check the settings on the 'extra' disc. I am able to access everything on my main hard drive normally in this state.

- The boot order (per F2-induced system setup) shows C:\, CD-ROM, and Intel IDE2.x with the second HD in place, but only the Intel entry without.

My question is thus: why will this system not boot with a single master hard drive?

No matter what happens, I need to get my CDRW reinstalled and burn some backups....this might be the time to start researching a new system.

 

I'd edit this if I could, but no luck. For starters a correction, now that I found where I wrote down the errors - it's an Intel UNDI message.

Swapped in my CDRW drive to try and do some backups, but didn't have any luck getting it recognized; here's what happens:

Original config is CD-ROM + DVD. System boots normally and recognizes both drives correcntly in Windows.

Swap *either* of those drives for the CD-RW, and a 'secondary HDD0 not found/secondary HDD1 not found' message comes up on boot, and Windows recognizes neither drive.

Either CD-RW or DVD singly also produces the same result.

Checked in the BIOS; in the original config it shows HDD/HDD/CD/CD, in any of the others, it comes up HDD/HDD/Unknown Device/Unknown Device.