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This applies to the MSI 875 family.

My board comes with the standard pair of dual channel ATA-100 IDE controllers (0 and 1) plus one dual channel ATA-133 controller and three S-ATA controllers. All my hard drives are either ATA-133 or S-ATA so I am using neither ATA-100 controller for any HDD.

You would think that either ATA-100 controller is available for the CD/DVD drives, but that is only true if 'P-ATA ONLY' is enabled in the BIOS.

If you need to set the BIOS to 'S-ATA ONLY' or 'P-ATA AND S-ATA' the system will not recognize the optical drive(s) if you attempt to use the ATA-100 controller 0 for the optical drives. You can only use controller 1, just as if a HDD cable was connect to controller 0.

If you are using controller 0 for an ATA-100 HDD, then the system will see the optical drive(s) on controller 1 regardless of the BIOS settings mentioned above.

Moral of the story: Always use the highest numbered available ATA-100 controller for the optical drive(s).

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Since posting this I received a reply from MSI (in under an hour!):

"The Intel IDE controller will support optical drives on IDE1 or IDE2. The IDE3 channel is provided by the Promise SATA RAID controller and will only support hard drives. Please configure the onchip IDE configuration as listed below and retest the system. Go into the BIOS under integrated peripherals/onchip IDE configuration and configure the settings as listed below.

ATA operate mode: Native
ATA configuration: SATA only
PATA keep enabled: YES
PATA channel selection: Both
Combined mode option: S-ATA 1st channel

Configure SATA as RAID: set to yes or no depending on if you plan on configuring a RAID."