Here are a few things I could think of that might help you out:

1. Have you tried removing the CD audio cables to see if that makes a difference?
2. Do you have chipset drivers installed? If so, what date are they from? (if you know that detail), sometimes older chipset driver versions can do weird things like this.
3. Do you have any PCI IDE Controllers you can use for testing? It's possible that the integrated IDE controller doesn't like it when you have two drives hooked up on one channel (IIRC some SFF desktops were like this).
4. Have you tried different IDE cables? or even different Molex connectors? (obvious, I know, but it's worth a shot if it hasn't been done already).

Also, what happens when you try to load the optical drives in DOS? (You can use a Windows 95/98 boot disk for this test).

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

Here are a few things I could think of that might help you out: […]
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Here are a few things I could think of that might help you out:

1. Have you tried removing the CD audio cables to see if that makes a difference?
2. Do you have chipset drivers installed? If so, what date are they from? (if you know that detail), sometimes older chipset driver versions can do weird things like this.
3. Do you have any PCI IDE Controllers you can use for testing? It's possible that the integrated IDE controller doesn't like it when you have two drives hooked up on one channel (IIRC some SFF desktops were like this).
4. Have you tried different IDE cables? or even different Molex connectors? (obvious, I know, but it's worth a shot if it hasn't been done already).

Also, what happens when you try to load the optical drives in DOS? (You can use a Windows 95/98 boot disk for this test).

Thanks, I will check the chipset drivers tomorrow.

I've at various points tried different IDE cables and removing the CD audio cables. The cases design makes running an IDE cable from the drive bay to the PCI expansion bay impossible.

Realistically, the next step would be installing a different hard drive and a fresh copy of 98SE to see if maybe it's a configuration error.

Tried booting from a DOS CD with IDE support and no matter what I do even using known good drives it always instantly says failed reading drive.

This is ridiculous. Is there any way to route CD audio from a single drive to 2 sound devices? Like maybe a CD ROM audio cable with two ends? Both the AWE64 and SB Live need CD ROM audio and due to the way my setup is opening the machine to swap the cable over each time is not an option.

I believe I have seen a CD-ROM audio cable with two ends (smaller, white connector and larger black connector with a tab). Not sure about quality if you terminate both ends by plugging them into a card.

The SB Live (at the least) has a spdif for the CD-ROM, right? You could run digital out to the SB Live connector and the analog out to the AWE64 CD Audio connector.