eide on gateway motherboard will not recognize hard drive

I just recently bought a surplus gateway computer from the state. The harde drive was wiped but the system is in good shape 1.9 pent 4 with 512 of rambus memory 64 meg vid card, good stuff but when I try to load the hard drive the system will not see it. I have tried different cables, different drives, I even switched the cable from the optical drive to the hard drive slot and the board then picks up the cd as a master so the eide ports work I just can’t get them to see a new hard drive. Is it possable that the motherboard drivers for gateway are what is stopping me, or rather the lack of them, Is there any way to get arround it.
Please help
Dennis