IDE Problem: No Masters, only Slaves

I am having a problem with an FIC VA 503+ motherboard that refuses to recognize any IDE devices as long as one of them is configured as ‘Master’. If I connect and configure one device per channel as ‘Slave’, it recognizes them properly and will bootto the operating system (Win 95), although much slower than normal. I have tried new cables, various hard drives and cd-roms, checked the settings in the bios and have flashed the bios to the latest version.