I bought an ECS motherboard with a WD SATA hard drive and Samsung SATA DVD+/-RW drive. The BIOS does not recognize either of these as IDE on boot. It gives me the lovely message "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". I have tried all the SATA options in the current BIOS. I am now going to take a USB floppy drive back to my room to attempt to upgrade the BIOS. In the meantime any advice would be much appreciated.

OK, it boots from the USB floppy and says "Starting..." then it stops reading the drive and halts. I think this board is just dead, which makes me very sad.

Do you have the bootable devices set, and the boot order correct?
Did you set the SATA option to "emulated IDE mode", or something like that?

I have the bootable devices set and I've tried manually choosing devices too (it says it can't find a CDROM or HDD). I tried all the different SATA modes.