Hi,
I have also heard of the 'hack' you are talking about, but it slips my mind as to where.
A couple of simple things come to mind, but may not be of any relevance here:
Make sure your single drive is at the end of the cable
Try re-connecting your CD/DVD ROM drive as master on the secondary IDE channel. Windows sometimes acts a bit strangely without any CDROM type drive available in the system.
Good luck!
