IDE Recognition Failure

Dear all, I've tried everything that I can think of to attempt to fix my problem. Can you help?

My gigabyte P35C-DS3R mobo has been having trouble recognising my IDE DVD Drive and I'm unsure as to why. With the power and the IDE cables plugged in, the drive will open, but it isn't recognised in XP or is Vista, and so no data will transfer from or to it.

Here's what I've tried so far

- BIOS Settings - auto drive detection, manual drive detection, altering the interfaces to SATA, RAID and IDE
- Making the drive Master, Slave, or Cable Select (and when on cable select, using jumpers to select master or slave)
- Unplugging all other drives (2 SATA drives)
- Trying a new IDE cable
- Trying my DVD drive in another computer (it works)
- Trying my new and old IDE cables in another computer (they work)
- IDE port checking - plugged in the power and data cables to an old IDE HD and also an old IDE CD Drive. The CD Drive didn't even power on (even though my DVD drive did this...strange), yet the HD spun up. It still remained un recognised in both XP and Vista however
- SATA port checking - when plugging in one of my SATA HDs to a certain port on the mobo, the BIOS reported that I had somehow installed an additional SATA HD of the exact same specifications in another port. This if course isn't true and it wasn't recognised in XP or Vista. To get around this I had to set that port to 'None' in the BIOS or it was reported everytime I booted up. When trying either of my SATA HDs in some of the other SATA ports, the system sometimes didn't boot at all depending on which port I used.

Therefore...

1. The SATA and IDE controllers/connectors/ports on the mobo have somehow been damaged -- OR --
2. I'm in need of a BIOS update (currently running version F2), although I'm wary of doing this having heard of numberous problems associated with flashing this board; http://forums.tweaktown.com/showthread.php?t=25051

Can anybody enlighten me and help me out?

Many thanks,
Mike