Windows 7 - Missing secondary IDE channel on a laptop - Suggestions?

I've been dealing with a DVD drive problem on a Compaq F700 series laptop for a while now.

The drive stopped working while the owner was away. Then it started causing freezes and crashes. I had her disable the CD drive in Device Manager to stop the freezes. That worked. When she came home for the holiday I finally got a chance to look at it.

When I looked in Device Manager there is no CD drive listed (remember, there was one previously - she disabled it). Nothing in Windows Explorer, Disk Management, Safe Mode.

I had a replacement IDE CD-ROM drive and replaced hers. No change.

I booted Ubuntu from a USB flash drive - no CD drive recognized in Ubuntu (therefore not a Windows problem).

So I go into the BIOS to see if the drive is recognized there. No information. There are no drives or channels showing anywhere in this BIOS, and there is no setting to look at or configure the drives in this laptop.

The BIOS is a HP/Phoenix BIOS version F.05 and this is one of those 'toy' BIOS utilities that have very few settings available. You can set the date and time, test the hard drive and memory, change the boot order, and that's pretty much it.

The motherboard is a Quanta 30EA Rev 86.09
The chipset is a nVidia nForce 560 Rev A2
AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60

Logic dictates that the secondary IDE channel was dying and is now dead on the motherboard, but I'd like to know if anyone here has any suggestions of anything else I can do to test this rig or re-activate the channel, if possible.