i am having a similar problem, it does not matter if i am using IDE or SATA hard drives. I have messed with the master/ slave ports, and nothing works.

tried to boot with -v and it says
"still waiting for root device"

dvd drive is SATA
hard drive is SATA or IDE (ATA)

get this little guy AFTER going into installer, thus I dont think that it is the DVD drive and the same DVD drive was used to install Zeph 10.5.1....