I am still in the process of building desktop. Here are the specs.

ECS P4S5A Motherboard
Pentium 1.4 gig
40gb Maxtor Hard disk
Kingston 256 DDR RAM
Cyberdrive CDRW

I am facing 2 problems at the moment. First, the BIOS is not reading the CDRW at all. It does read the Hard disk though. I have set hard disk as Master on IDE1 and CDRW as Master on IDE2. I have tried various other combinations such as switching the CDRW with the Hard disk, changing the Master/Slave combination but with no positive result. I can see the hard disk on IDE2 as well, so the controller does not seem to be bad. The CDRW does get powered on as I see the lights blinking on it.
Secondly, the BIOS hangs very often. When I enter BIOS for configuration settings, it hangs after few seconds. The only thing I do not have installed yet is a floppy drive. I do not think that should cause this a problem, but will install it and see if it helps.
Thanks

Take it back?

Oh, my. An ECS board. I don't know if he should take it back or burn it and bury the ashes!

Seriously, I'd return the motherboard and the CD-R/W drive.

In general, those are truly awful boards. (Although some people have had good experiences with them.)

You might want to do some research on the PowerSpec computer systems sold by Microcenter/MEI. Nearly all of them are made by ECS and use ECS boards. You won't believe the horror stories. (I used to support the awful things, so I know the stories are probably all true.)

This is not to say that *all* ECS boards are bad, but I have never personally seen a good one (and I have actually seen hundreds, both in sample systems and as service parts) and I do know that ECS makes some of the worst motherboards on earth. (PC Chips and Tseng Labs are right up there (or DOWN there) with them.)

The Lite On and Cyberdrive optical drives were also used in PowerSpecs and many other low cost and "free" computer systems ("free" with computer repair classes or ISP subscriptions) and are notoriously unreliable. Inexplicably, some of these have gotten great reviews in PC World, but then again, reviews in PC World are kinda... well... weird sometimes.

By the way:

If the system is locking up while you're running the motherboard's CMOS setup utility, you've probably got a defect the motherboard, power supply, or both. (A CPU defect is possible, but these really are quite rare.)

Also, this is an issue I saw with great frequency in PowerSpec systems.

The motherboard and power supply are arguably the most important, critical parts in the whole system. Ironically, these are the two parts on which most people (OEM vendors and individuals) skimp.

I'd save some money by cutting corners on the CPU and maybe in a couple of other areas, but I wouldn't dare skimp on the motherboard and power supply.

Where can I learn about motherboards and other computer parts, along with many other computer topics i.e. spyware and POP3 servers. Just trying to get more out of my comp. thanks

Your boot hangs for a bit because it sees somthing, but not sure what. The CDRW turning on can really only verify the power is connected correctly.
Try setting Sec-Master to SCSI, and change floppy to Disabled, don't want it looking for a floppy that isn't there. The fact that your HDD will work there means that your Moatherboard and IDE controller are probably OK.
Also, have you tried booting to a bootable CD, like Win 98SE or newer (don't install). There are just so many things this could be, but if it's not a BIOS setting it's probably the drive.