i have an ASUS p5vd2-vm se, celron d 356, 3.33ghz, 2 sticks of 1gb ddr2 667 ram, a 200gb sata hard drive, and an optic drive connected to the ide.

The problem is that when i boot up, if i set the bios to auto for the components, it doesnt see my CDROM. my hdd connected by sata reads fine, but theres nothing on it yet. if i set my primary to CDROM, it says "Primary master not ATAPI Compatible" or something like that, now i've tried switching the optic drive's jumpers from master to cable selected, and back again, double checked all my connections, theres only one spot for IDE on the board so it's not like i could plug it into the wrong place. The book talks about IDE devices and cdroms, but theres nothing about this problem.


if anyone can help, please do, i'm at my wit's end

A couple of suggestions:
Change the IDE cable-- they are notorious.
Check for a bent pin-- either on the drive or mobo.

i checked for bent pins, tried 3 different IDE cables, including the new one that came with the mobo, reset bios, loaded defaults, tried setting it to cdrom again. no luck. i have no clue what the problem is, and i made sure to buy a new CDROM that says on it "ATAPI/EIDE Compatible" i just spent the last half hour trying to get it to get past the cd problem. with the one that's in there right now, if i pop a cd in and reboot, on automatic or with the cdrom set to read as cdrom, it sounds liek it's trying to read the disk, but then i see "Reboot and select correct drive, or load media into default drive and hit any key" nothing is working

It's brand-new--?
Where did you buy it?
It is a "budget" model-- I think you got a bad one-- it does happen-- even from Asus.

i dont know if it's considered a budget board, but i got it from newegg, so it's possible

User reviews @ Newegg is where I saw it referred to as a budget-- I also saw a few DOA reviews too.
Newegg is very good-- i would get an RMA for that one.... why suffer when you don't have to?