cmos won't detect harddrive

For some, unknown reason, a VIA motherboard with an AMD (can't remember specifics of either) processor will not detect a hard drive. I've tried with two different ones: one that might've been corrupt, and one that I knew damn well worked. I had them hooked up as master and plugged into the motherboard, and on the one that might be corrupted (one that has a light), the green light will come on for a few seconds at startup, then stop, but the hard drive will still be running (but then the mobo doesn't want to acknowledge its existence). I've tried it with an old maxtor 4.5 gig hdd that I used the night before, and it was working, but it wasn't being detected by this motherboard. Manually entering the hard drive into cmos didn't work either. The IDE plug in the motherboard isn't damaged, because plugging the cd-rom into it, the motherboard detects that as the primary drive. What could the problem be?

 

i assume you are trying the auto setup?

in the Bios is there a seperate menu option to detect ide devices? try that if there is.

i'm not personally familiar with VIA mobo's sont dont know what your bios is likely to have.

 

Yes, I've tried ide auto-detect in cmos. Still no luck.

 

are there ant jumpers on the drive?
can you post it make and model?