HDD and optical recognized but no boot

Question

First attempt at building a computer, after having prebuilts for 11 years:  I've run into a problem; it will not boot from the hard or optical drive.  It sees them quite properly in the BIOS setup and as booting:
>Primary IDE Master        ST380013A
>Primary IDE Slave         Not installed
>Secondary IDE Master    ATAPI COMBO48XMA
>Secondary IDE Slave      Not installed
>Third IDE Master            Not installed
>Third IDE Slave              Not installed
>Fourth IDE Master           Not installed
>Fourth IDE Slave            Not installed
However, it does not seem to actually touch them in the boot sequence; I do not hear any activity from the drive, and it hangs with a blinky cursor and blank screen at the point I think it should be loading OS (and the diagnostic blinkenlights that came with the motherboard show all green as "booting OS") .   I put a bootable CD into the optical to test, and it does not access/boot from there either.  
Hard drive is on IDE1 using the nifty cable that came with the motherboard; it is a known good drive as of yesterday (transplant from my old computer, and fairly new).  Optical drive is on IDE2 using a standard ribbon cable from my old computer, a new drive.  I do not have a floppy connected.
I have fiddled with the jumpers, currently both drives are jumpered to "master".  At first I was having issues booting, the Promise controller gave me "device not found" errors, then "No BIOS found"; since I wasn't using that (and I don't fiddle enough to plan on using it, if there is an issue with it) I went into the BIOS and disabled that controller, no more errors.  I also removed floppy from the boot sequence, since no floppy, and doublechecked to confirm that both other drives are listed in the boot sequence.
Help!

Answer 1

I've fiddled with so many variations, I'm starting to have trouble keeping track >
Checked Chip ATA Operating Mode, it is currently (as of last attempt to boot after tweaking) in the suggested settings, EXCEPT P-ATA Keep Enabled is No and is greyed out, with no way to change it as far as I can tell.
Ram voltage is 2.65V, haven't touched that at all in the process.
I have been swapping channels, after deciding in some desperation to ignore the manual ("First hard drive must be on IDE1").  If I put DVD on IDE1 and HDD on IDE2, no change.  I tried putting the HDD on IDE3, and it was not seen in BIOS, but the computer still asked to "Press any key to boot to CD" as if it saw a second bootable device (though HDD was set as primary boot at that time, and not showing up in BIOS anyway in that configuration).  If the drives are both in IDE1 and IDE2 they do at least show up in BIOS.
If the hard drive is primary boot device, the computer just stops at blinky cursor, doesn't try to get to the DVD to boot.  If the DVD is primary boot, it will ask to "Press any key to boot to CD" (now finally figured out how to get it to respond to a keystroke, legacy USB support in BIOS turned on ... though the keyboard had worked just fine in the BIOS without).  
I've swapped cables and both work properly when attached to the DVD when it's the boot device so doesn't seem like they're the problem.