I couldn't decide if this should go in hardware or this section, but here's my question. It's a little long, so please bear with me.
In hardware class, we're installing a second hard drive in our computers. Sounds easy enough. I made one drive the slave and the other the master (by removing the shunts, or course). I attatched one end of the IDE to one drive, attatched the middle of the IDE cable to the other drive, and finally, the other end to the controllers on the motherboard. I had no blue smoke, so the IDE cables were placed correctly.
However, I needed to get into the BIOS in order to prove that I had a master and a slave drive. I saw that I only had a master. When my teacher gave me a different drive, I replaced that with the slave drive. That, too, didn't work because now I didn't see any drives in the BIOS. I decided to switch the other drive to the one that I took out previously. I ran into yet another problem: When I pressed F1 in order to get into the bios, it recognized the drives the first time, froze, and then when I restarted, it froze without recognizing that drives were in the computer.
I checked the power supply and made shre the IDE cables were installed. I even made sure that I had the shunts placed correctly. If anyone can help me and tell me what I'm doing wrong (that's the question), I'd greatly appreciate it.

Troubleshooting hardware is usually done by a process of elimination. Given your history, the first thing I would do is try swapping out the ide cable just to eliminate that as a potential source of problems.

Also, one bad device on an ide channel can cause both devices on the channel to not function correctly. You see this a lot with optical drives but it can conceivably also happen with a bad hard drive.

Double check your jumpers on the hard drives. If you are using an 80 wire ide cable, you would normally jumper the drives cable select. If you are using a 40 wire ide cable, you should explicitly jumper master and slave. The placement of the jumpers for master, slave, cable select, varies from one manufacturer to the next so make sure you are doing this correctly for the make of hard drive(s) you are using.