Not sure about your specific situation, but I had some growing pains with my Abit NF7-S, another N-Force board. I've solved most of them, but had to make some concessions. My CDR drive flaked out as the secondary master or secondary slave, so I had to move it to the primary IDE chain, and move my 2 hard drives to the secondary master/slave. Don't know why, and the fix makes no sense, but it worked. My floppy drive wasn't working either, and it works in my other system, so maybe I have a bad FDD controller on the board, but I hate floppies anyway, so I'm kinda glad to see it go. I can always boot from a CD.

I see your IDE setup is kinda like mine, the one difference is the NF7-S has the SATA connector, so I'm using my main hard drive off that one (using the "serillel" connector.) It might be more of a hassle for you to move your CD/DVD drives to the primary chain, as you don't have the extra IDE to play with, so you'd have to play with the boot settings to get it to boot from a secondary drive.

Still, might be worth a shot, since your problems sound IDE related.