I believe I installed Mandrake 9.0. Both CD drives were showing, they were just both reporting as inaccessible. I think I did partially solve the problem though. On the primary IDE channel I only had 1 hard drive installed. I installed a second hard drive, which I am having other issues with atm, but my Master CD drive became accessible. I am going to try reinstalling the OS because while trying to figure out what was wrong I changed some settings that I believe is effecting my access to the slave drive. ( that is what I get for changing things without knowing what I am doing, but that is also a great way to learn.) I will have to get back to you on the info in that file as I am at work now and trying to figure out how to install the network drivers that I now have access to.
Basically what I am doing is I have 3 hard drives, and Windows XP as my primary OS. I took a spare hdd and connected it on its own and installed Linux. After my tinkering and frustration I installed and reformatted my back-up windows drive into a FAT32 partition. That went fine although I have not been able to access it yet. Part of my intent is that as a FAT32 windows will still be able to read the drive when I switch my cables back to boot off of that disk, so I can place files into the secondary drive for access in both windows and linux. That way I would be able to access the net through windows, and also move over any files that I would like to access in linux.
Part of my problem is my inability to connect to the net so I have to switch back to the windows drive and have no way of recording information outside of writing it on paper.
I really appreciate your assistance, and will try to be as specific as possible in the future.