Conductor cable error with Maxtor HD

I have a custom made PC that i made myself. It has a Soltek motherboard and a Maxtor white label hard drive. When booting my system i recieve an error message: “Primary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed”. When i swapped in several different (older) Western Digital drives i no longer recieved the error, i even tried swapping cables on those good drives as well as the maxtor to see if the cabling is at fault. I went so far as to get a replacement drive from the manufacturer (the previous one was losing data) but i still get the error. I’ve not yet been able to find a solution and thought i could see what information i could turn up here. What is causing this problem? I have a hunch that my mainboard controller is bad.
Thanks
Matt