We've done some more troubleshooting. I have helped The Scientist on aim extensively and still we cannot come to a conclusion. The Scientist built his computer pretty much off of the specs I have on my computer, except he got the 3700 processor while I got the 3000.
I remember reading that RAM can cause some weird things to happen to computers, so we tried some different configurations with that. What I told him to do was remove 2 sticks, so he had one gig remaining in the computer, and boot it. Nothing happened. Then, he ran a single 512 stick, booted it... nothing happened. Then, we tried once more with a DIFFERENT 512 stick, same deal, nothing happened. So I think it's safe to say that, as unlikely as it was for RAM being the problem, we can cross that off of the list.
Also, since the power supply was changed, it's pretty evident that we can cross that off of the list.
We've tried different combinations of everything I could think of. We've reset the jumpers on the optical drives, ran a single drive, etc. For example, I had him disconnect both drives, and set one aside. With the other drive, setting the jumpers to master, hooking it back up, and seeing if there was a connection made. No go... We did the same thing with the other optical drive, same deal.
So now we're stuck between a rock and a very hard place... I'm all out of ideas, I don't know what could be restricting the optical drives to function properly. When I boot up my computer within 10-15 seconds I'm able to pop them open and/or get a green LED response from the front of them.
And step by step, I've went through and made sure he's wired up everything properly. We're stuck. I just don't know what else it could be. Everytime we think we have it pinpointed, we prove ourselves wrong.