Okay, so I got the optical drive working, but now I can't load Windows. Every time I try to boot from the optical drive, it says "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected device and press a key", and every time I follow the instructions, the message just loops over and over again. All the cables are plugged in this time.

I'm at a Christmas party right now, so I won't be able to do it until probably tomorrow. I sort of have an idea where I went wrong. Are there supposed to be two cables running from the optical drive? There's another cable that goes in, I'm just not sure where it goes. I'll take a picture for future reference.if I don't end up figuring it out.

Well, I'm getting a message that says no bootable device. So I'm missing a cable or something is plugged incorrectly.

Will have to tinker around a bit more. I'll keep you guys updated.

@TDuiker: It was a mistake. Sorry.

@jun_aka_pekto: To the best of my knowledge, all the SATA cables are connected. Both hard drives are plugged in (the old one being in the bracket right below the new one).

What I'm confused about is where to go next. I tried putting in my Windows 7 installation disk and that didn't do anything.

I tried consulting the motherboard manual, and the instructions are all over the place. There's around 15 or so pages dedicated to setting up RAID, which obviously misguided me into thinking that enabling RAID would be crucial to setting up my hard drives. I now know that's not the case. It also says something about putting the motherboard drivers disk into another computer and copying some files onto a flash drive that I need for the OS installation, but I don't know if that's necessary. I can't tell if that's mandatory, or if there's a way to simply boot from the optical drive and run the disk that way. Either way, I haven't figured it out yet.

I normally try to avoid tinkering with my BIOS (that goes for my previous computer) because of the high potential for hardware malfunctions as a result. I'm sure I can figure it out, but I need a more concrete lead. Because this manual is not giving me anything.

@kraken2109: Okay. So I want to use both hard-drives. What do I do? Because the motherboard instructions are not making any fucking sense to me. The instructions are organized in a confusing way and I have absolutely no idea where to start.

@Truth_Hurts_U: I don't think a USB keyboard is going to cut it for this task. I may just have to wait until I can get a hold of a PS/2 keyboard.

@jun_aka_pekto: You were right. Shorting the CLR-CMOS jumper seemed to do the trick. I'm back in my BIOS now.

The reason I wanted to utilize the RAID feature is because I'm also using a hard-drive from my old computer. I guess I'm just going to have to forget about that for now (for better or for worse).

Maybe the reason it didn't work was because the other hard-drive wasn't plugged in when I tried to do it?

I just want to be able to access both hard-drives. I didn't think it would be this complicated.

Welp.

So now I'm trying to configure my BIOS, and I'm trying to set up my harddrives (two 1TB HDDs) and I tried to get into the RAID setup and I can't get past the first screen where it says to press Ctrl-F. Can't boot back to BIOS, can't press any keys, nothing works. I am stuck on this screen.

What now?

@jun_aka_pekto: Yeah, man. I'm gonna wait until tomorrow morning/afternoon to configure my BIOS. I'm still coming down from my high because of my success. :P

Thanks a lot for your contributions to this thread.