What IO port and IRQ have you configured the AWE32's ATAPI interface for? If it's 170,15 then it'd conflict with on-board secondary port and potentially cause hard disk detection issues, even if your system drive is on the primary port (1f0,15). Try setting it to the tertiary port, 1e8,11.

Hard drives will not be detected on the AWE32.

Also, we know with certainty it's an ATAPI controller on the AWE32, but what CD drive have you connected? And is pin 1 matched up correctly everywhere?

Forgive my late reply, I posted this before going to bed.
According to the jumper configuration, it's already in tertiary mode, but I have no idea how to tell what IO / IRQ it's on. As I have no idea if the previous owner used any custom configuration on it.

I've managed to find some information on the card and it's configuration, and I've managed to confirm its on factory defaults. Tertiary mode and IDE IRQ 11.

I also made sure to line up the red painted wire on my ribbon cable with pin one, so unless they had wire printing backwards back in the day, I'm pretty sure I got that bit right.

The cd drive is the unknown here. It's a benq 2410A-534. That is the only model information on the device. It is however a cdrom burner so I'm wondering if that isn't causing some incompatibility?
I don't have any other optical drive with an IDE interface...

Definitely IDE.
Maybe the additional electrical load is causing a problem. That drive should work on the same cable with the hard drive, so long as the right cable positions and jumpers (CS/SL/MA) are correct.

Do you have another system you can try the drive in? It may be something about the drive, rather than the card.

You could also make that drive the primary master (and ONLY) IDE drive and boot from a floppy diskette to see if the drive is detected, and if detected, that it can read CDs.

It may be noteworthy that I am using an IDE to CF card adaptor to serve as a fixed disk, as I couldn't get my hands on a functional ide drive under 2gb in size.

Unfortunately I don't have another functioning machine with an IDE controller to test the optical drive on. But I have secured access to another drive since my last reply.

I'm going to admit to something here, I have a vague idea of how cable select is supposed to work, but not a clue how to actually set it up. I know my way around master and slave pretty well though. But something tells me my cf card adaptor doesn't have a jumper configuration I can set. Have to look more at that at some point. But I figured I would ask here about the soundcard first because I honestly don't know much about the IDE controllers on them and how they are supposed to operate. I only know that it is definitely marked as IDE port, someone here mentioned its Atapi only, and I found a document online listing the various jumper configurations.

Technomancer21 wrote:

I'm going to admit to something here, I have a vague idea of how cable select is supposed to work, but not a clue how to actually set it up.

Both drives must be set to Cable Select and then their position on the cable determines the master or slave-- master at the far end of the cable, slave on the middle connector. Use a known CS-compatible cable for it, to eliminate the guesswork the 80-wire/40-pin IDE UltraATA cable will be set up that way.

I'll give this a try but if it works then I'm going to need to find a whole new way to mount my cf card reader. I have a funky case design that is royally inconvenient. Was hoping to have the cf card mounted on the backplane so I could pull it out without dismantling the case, but if I can't get the soundcard port to work and cable select becomes my only option, damn. I'll have to see what sorcery I can do to fit it in behind the front bay speakers.