Ok, either your doing the jumper settings wrong, the IDE cables are damaged, or your hardwares on the way out.

the jumpers, i know are correct (I know how to set a jumper!!!!!;P) closing the pin headers marked CS or MA

the cables i know worked because i swapped them with the ones from my computer and my computer worked fine but the dell still didn't

the hardware going... possible. though the mobo has been replaced before after i blew it up... erm... accidentilly of course. why can't dell put fudgeing temperature sensors in goddammit!!!! the new motherboard is only about 2 years old and they say a computer should last about 10 years before something big breaks as loong as you don't fiddle. the only fiddling I've done (this is beggining to sound dodgy) is installing some more ram (128mb oem and 256mb currently installed) and putting in a dvd burner but that's now in my new computer.

can you do manual boot device select, instead of setting ti to priority device??

I had a similar problem, but it showed up in manual select

yes i can. i tried that and it doesn't show up there either.

the really strange thing that is confusing me though is the fact that the cd drive shows up in windows xp but not in the bios.

:S

anyone?????

my brothers beginning to get annoyed at me.....