need help adding extra HD to gateway 500. already have two optical drives, zip, floppy and OEM Maxitor HD. CD-RW, Zip, floppy cabled to motherboard. HD set as cable select to motherboard. CD-ROM coupled to PCI card in one of two slots. Should I hook the extra Western Digital HD set up as a slave to a separate cable to the PCI card or try to add it to the OEM HD cabled to the motherboard. Tried cabling Extra HD to motherboard as slave with CD-RW but os froze when I attemped to install the drivers. and I had to restore the OS from an earlier point. Sould I set the WD HD to CS. Any assistance welcome

Oh boy...I don't wanna start another huge debate on IDE cabling...but I personally would not use cable select...EVER! But that's just me... I'm wondering why you have a PCI controller card...RAID? Other than that, assuming you have 2 IDE channels on your mobo...that's what I would use. Make sure the master/slave jumpers are set properly on the back of each device...it's also a good practice to connect the master to the end connector on the IDE cable & the slave to the middle connector. Here's what I'd suggest: primary master = Maxtor HDD primary slave = CD-ROM secondary master = CD burner secondary slave = WDC HDD What drivers are you talking about?

You should not have to install any drivers when adding a hard drive to the system.