I have the Win XP on a SATA harddrive and a CDRW on IDE. Just bought a second IDE harddrive and planning to install Ubuntu. How should I connect the second HD? as master or slave to the CDRW or if available on a separate IDE channel? Any ideas will be much appreciated

Separate IDE if possible. Slave to secondary channel if available. Life's more painless for the brainless.

In order to boot to the second harddrive your BIOS MAY require the harddrive to be jumpered as a master. I am assumming you only have ONE IDE controller? If so, then jumper the HD as Master. If a second channel is available then use it and jumper both drives as Master, placing one on each channel.

I found that there is only one IDE channel on the computer. Just wondering if connecting it as master or slave will make much difference to the speed of the HD. I just bought a new IDE UDMA cable for it. By the way, I found that many IDE (old) cables cannot plug securely into the HD. The connection is loose and will just slid right off. The number of pins are right ie 39 but it is loose and does not conduct. Is it because they are the older type cables? Has anyone else had this problem?

On modern computers the IDE controller can run two drive at different speeds so it doesn't make any difference if Master or Slave. As I stated above a non Windows OS MAY require the drive be set to master. If using Master/slave jumper settings the location of the drives on the cable doesn't matter. You can connect the master in the center or end. Using CS (cable select) results in the drive at the end of the cable to be the Master.