I have a suspicion that the onboard IDE controllers may not be working. Every disk I use to setup this machine reports as damaged (using a win xp installation to test, since it gets to partition setup fastest)

So, I popped an IDE PCI Controller card in, to test with, but no drives are showing up in the bios now. I went into setup and changed the BIOS settings to disable onboard IDE1 and 2 to test, but still didn't detect the drives.

How do I get that working?

It's a standard PC with a 160GB disk and DVD Drive on master and slave channels on a single cable, if that helps. Let me know what else I need to state.