Can my second hard drive be secondary slave?

[needhelp]

I am thinking of installing a second hard drive on my computer to use for my photo applications and files. My computer has one hard drive at the present time, Primary master of course and I have CD ROM Primary slave and CD R/W Secondary master. This is the way my installation software for my HP CD R/W instructed me to do it and it runs just fine set up that way.
Now the question is, can i keep these drives connected in their present configuration and put a second hard drive on as secondary slave and if I do, would it work okay.
I think I have read somewhere that a second hard drive has to be installed as primary slave. If this is so, will my burner work okay configured on the same IDE connector as my CD ROM drive and would I have to change the CD ROM to secondary master and have the Burner as secondary slave or will it be okay to leave the Burner as secondary master and the CD ROM as secondary slave.
I guess what I'm saying is that it would be easy for me to install my second hard drive as secondary slave if it will work this way.

[mike breck]

Yes, you can keep you your present setup and just install the HD as Secondary Slave. Many people have their HDs and optical drives on separate channels like this. It can help with burning from CD-Rom to Burners.

HTH

[MonkeyBlitch]

Make your second HD a slave by placing the jumpers in the correct position then place it in your slave IDE cable and format in windows. Your good to go...

[glc]

If you are going to put a hard drive on the secondary, upgrade to an 80 wire cable if it doesn't already have one and use Cable Select jumpering.

[needhelp]

Thanks guys much appreciated. Just for the record, what will happen with my drive assigned letters, will they remain the same and the secondary slave hard drive become my "F" drive or will it become my "D" drive and the others be pushed up a letter?

[glc]

It depends on how the original drive is partitioned and how you partition the new drive. If the original drive is a single partition, yes, it will become D but if you have Win2K or XP you can change it to whatever you want after the fact in disk management. If you have 9x/ME it's gonna be stuck at D.

[needhelp]

Thanks glc