I want to add a 320 G Western Digital hard drive to a Dell Dimension 2400. I have added a PCI Connector Card. The existing hard drive is a 120 G Western Digital hard drive with the jumper set at Cable Selection. I have a power cord connector and a 80 Pin connector ribbon and a cage to connect the second hard drive into the case. I have two combo DVD/CD read/write drives, a floppy drive, a modem card, a Firewire card. I have 1 G of memory(two 512 M) chips. What changes to the BIOS and the jumpers must I make to the hard drives? Which parts of the ribbon cable do I connect? Do I have switch the cables and the master/slave combination for the DVD/CD combo drives and floppy?

I don't use cable select, but as the name implies, the cable selects which is master & which is slave. Just set both drives to CS...the drive connected to the end plug is the master, the one connected to the middle plug is the slave.

"I want to add a 320 G Western Digital hard drive to a Dell Dimension 2400. I have added a PCI Connector Card" You can have 4 IDE drives on the existing 2 IDE channels already. If you insist, you can install the PCI card and follow the (badly or poorly written) instructions. It may or may not be supported on reboot. Might have to install drivers depending on card. You should not have to fool with bios. The system IDE is most likely the first active bootable partition. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

One other point to note. Some controller cards do not support ATAPI (optical) devices.