Asus SATA, IDE, DVD burner Problems

[will413]

I bought a Asus P5l-mx motherboard that is supposed be able to use IDE or SATA hard drives. I first hooked up my DVD burner and one hard drive so I could load windows. I have another hard drive of the same but the board did not have IDE2 port. Windows loaded fine but after booting into windows I tried to install all my drivers but I got nothing but errors, ( not a win32 application or I/o error. I did everything I could think of and finely I went into my bios setup and set the DMA and another setting and rebooted and it worked like a charm but I do not understand why I had to manually set it up. I decided to buy two IDE to SATA converters so I could run my hard drives on my SATA ports and my DVD burner on my IDE1 port. My system would not recognize my hard drives connected to the converters. I tried every setting in the book in the bios and the hard drives and tried it on the DVD burner and another hard drive and still the system would but recognize any of the drives connected to the SATA ports. So I decided to go with two hard drives on IDE 1. One hard drive worked find but the other formated in dos but in windows the hard drive does not show up. I run Maxtor Blaster 4 for windows to see if could configure it with the utility but it stated that there was no drive to configure. I tried different cables but that did not work. I have been trying to reach Asus tech support for five and a half days now. I sent three Emails and got no response. I used their live support two time only to be told that no one was available to help me. I have called three times. The third time I waited for their tech support to answer. When someone responded after about 10 minutes I told him what was going on. After I was through he told me he was not a technician even though I called support and he said he would take my number and they would call be back. I am still waiting. Maybe someone in the forum have had a similar problem with Asus motherboards and can help me. Three years ago Asus tech support was the best and I would buy their boards but now they must be having so many problems with their boards that they have to put half the callers on permanent hold. If I can't find any answerers I will assume that the motherboard is defected and send it back for a replacement

Hard drive Maxtor 6y120 PO
bios updated today to latest
CPU Itel Pentium4 d 3.4
Motherboard P5l-mx