How long is the IDE cable you're trying to use?

The cable is pretty standard length. The two drives are at the top of my mid-tower case and the cable just barely reaches. All the cables I have are the same length and, yes, I tried swapping in another cable, with the same results. In fact, the exact same sequence of goofy high-ASCII characters when it reports the drive's name and model number.

Also, have you looked for firmware updates for the drives in question?

Yeah, but to apply the firmware, I need to be able to boot to DOS, and, interestingly enough, neither of my floppy drives are working. Can you tell it hasn't been my finest hour in my PC building career? I planned on making a bootable DOS CD-RW, but didn't get to it last night amongst all the other problems.