This is probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve encountered with hardware in quite some time, so I’ll write it down here…
Got a box with an ASUS P5B mainboard, four SATA harddrives and an ATAPI DVD drive in it. The task: Install Linux. Simple enough. I switched on the machine and pressed the button on the DVD drive in order to insert the Linux DVD. Nothing happened. Also the small LED didn’t indicate that anything was going on with that DVD drive, at no time of the boot procedure. After half an hour of investigating (checking jumpers on the DVD drive, exchanging the data cable and whatnot) I found out (from here) that it is in fact impossible to boot from an ATAPI optical drive (like 99% of all CD/DVD drives out there are).
It is very important to notice that the single ATA/133 port available on this motherboard is controlled by the JMicron chip, not by the chipset. This means that if you still have a parallel IDE optical drive it will only be recognized on Windows after you install JMicron’s driver. The problem is that this driver comes on the motherboard CD-ROM, and you won’t be able to install it, as the system does not recognize your optical drive. You can download the driver from the net, however the driver for the on-board LAN port is also on the CD-ROM… The only option you have is to copy the JMicron driver from the CD to a floppy disk or a USB pen drive using another PC. This problem happens not only with this motherboard from ASUS, but also with all other motherboards based on Intel P965 chipset we’ve seen to date. Of course if you have a SATA optical drive you won’t face this issue.
I especially “like” the part with the drivers being delivered on a CD. Of course this whole “little issue” isn’t mentioned in the manual, let alone in the product description or in any other place you would expect it to be mentioned.