Although, I seem to remember having this problem before as well, and it wasn't related to the cables or anything (I think). My solution may have been to simply stop using one of the drives, althought that's not a very graceful one.

Yeah. I *really* wanted these two to work in this system, since the CD-ROM drive is 52X and my CD-RW is only 40X. The CD-ROM has much faster audio extraction as well. This is what I get for taking parts from three different computers and thinking I will get a working system in the end.