I recently bought a new hard drive for my performa 6320 System 7.5.3. I know i cant put two hard drives in there, but i dont have any of my system software ( i bought the computer used and they didnt have any of the disks) what i thought about doing was taking out the cd-rom temporarily and puting attaching the hard drive there, then when i booted from the other hard drive i could initialize the other hard drive and copy all of my software over to that drive, then i could replace the old one with the larger one and hood the cd rom back in. Will this work?

If I am correct, the 6320 has IDE drives, yes? Then you CAN put two HD's in there if there is a bay for the additional drive. You would have to get the proper mounting 'sled' to physically put it in there, attach the ribbon cable and power plug (might have to get a couple of cheap extensions/splitters as needed to do the job) and designate it (with the jumper pins on the drive itself) as a 'slave'. If SCSI, then same applies except you must set the SCSI id to 2 or 5 or something in between. Do yourself a favor and spend some spare change on a sys 7.6 install CD. They're cheap, and it will save you such hassles. Plus you get the proper pleasures of a nice fresh system install, and will have it for future use. You should never be without a system install disk. And Remember: to boot from a CD, you put the CD in and hold down the 'C' key when the mac is powering up.

Save yourself alot of grief. Check out "MacWorld Mac Upgrader and Repair Bible" boof by Todd Staufffer especially Chapter 6 page 244 (in the 2nd edition). I think you are right. You can't add a second drive with out installing a new IDE controller like the one from Sonnet Technologies or other companies. The new IDE controller interfaces are considerably faster which is an added bonus. The newest Sonnet accomodates 4 drives and accepts 4 devices and is compatible with Apple drive software.