Hard Drive Not Recognised ATAPI incompatabile

Hi I have just spent the last hour sifting through the numerous ATAPI incompatible errors but could not find the solution to mine.  So hope someone can help me.

I have a PC given to me by a friend.  Here are the specs:
American Megatrends BIOS release 9/14/2001
AMD Athlon 1150 processor
512 Mb RAM
No hard drive, no cdrom drive (although I do konw he had 2 hard drives, CD ROM and DVD ROM installed before he gave it to me)

I then added:
1 ASUS CD-S500/A cdrom - set to master
1 Quatnum Fireball Plus 30 GB hard drive - set to master - (Windows 98SE installed)

During boot up the following happens in the sequence below:

...
Wait...
Sec Master: V2.1H - ASUS CD-S500/A
(pause)

AMD Athlon Processor-1150MHz
Sec Slave Drive - ATAPI Incompatible
Press F1 to Resume

When I press F1 I get the PC info screen, in which there is a referwence to Hard Disk(s) as follows:
...
Hard Disk(s)     Cyl     Head Sector Size         LBA       32Bit       Block      PIO     ATA
                                                                 Mode     Mode      Mode     Mode   Mode
Secondary Master: CDROM                                                                  4         33
...

then SD RAM at DIMM #: 1,2

Boot failure
...Insert Boot disk into media and press any key to continue

Then I get the Microsoft Windows 98 CD-ROM Start up menu
1. Boot from Hard Disk
2. Boot from CD-ROM

If I choose boot from Hard Disk   --  nothing happens

If I choose Start Windows 98 from CD-ROM: (after PCI bus scan complete)
I get a blue/green screen with the following message:
Your computer does not have a hard disc, you hard disc is not functionin properly or your hard disc requires a special devise driver
when I hit F3 I go back to dos d:\WIN98>  (dir prompt here reveals contents as setup exe, autorun inf etc)

If I choose start Windows 98 with OR without CD-ROM support: (after PCI bus scan complete)
I am at the A:\>    (dir prompt here reveals contents as autoexec bat, command comm, config sys, fdisk himem sys etc)

So I have concluded that
1. A: is actually the Quatum Fireball hard drive I installed
2. D: is the CD-ROM drive
3. B: is the floppy drive (I tested this with a floppy)

I know the Quantum Fireball drive works as I have no problm when I install it into another PC.  I tried an old 1GB drive and all of the above happened again.

I can't get into the CMOS (not that I would know what to do anyway) as no matter what I do hit DEL, F1 etc I can't interrupt the boot sequence.

Please help.