I have 2 Hard drives, 1 cd-rom drive, and 1 cd-rw drive, and a floppy drive. I need to know what kind of setup i should use, which drives i should set as masters and slaves. Currently I have 1 of the 2 harddrives already set-up and it contains data that i need, and they are too big to back up. How would i go about adding the new harddrive and cd-rom drive?

You want to put the drives that you are going to be transferring data between most often on separate channels. The following `might' be the best. However, if you are going to do most of your burning from the second hard drive, you would want to swap the two CD drives. Hard drive - Primary master CDrom drive - Primary slave Hard drive - Secondary master CDRW drive - Secondary slave

Wow, that was amazingly fast reply. So I would put 1 hard drive and cd-rom drive both primary sharing one ide cable and 1 hard drive and cd-rw drive on the other ide cable both secondary. I have information on one of the drives, how would i install a say windows xp on the empty drive with out reformating my current drive? and where would i put my floppy drive? Thanks a bunch for the reply Ham, it was greatly appreciated.

I'd put the CD drives on their own channel(Secondary master/slave). Because I don't know if this is true or not but, I heard somewhere that puttting a CD drive on the same channel as a hard drive can dramaticly slow the hard drives speed when you use the CD drive. Symbios

Symbios, that used to be true many years ago. But it's not true anymore. Nav, if you want a dual boot system, you can just do a normal XP install, but tell the install program to install it on the second drive. It will automatically set up a boot menu. When you start up your system you will get an option of which system to boot. Be careful when you do the install. It's easy to mess up and install over your current system. The Floppy is hooked to it's own connector on the motherboard. It's a little shorter than the IDE connectors.

Alrite, thanks guys. I'm gonna try to install it as soon as I get these scratches off my Windows XP cd. I knew i should have backed it up =\.