Thanks all the information from people. Just to let you know how this ultimately
came out...

The nice people at Mitsuba[1] shipped me a machine WITHOUT WINDOWS, mouse or
keyboard (nice saving since I didnt want it). In addition the CD and HD were
already on the same IDE channel setup with the disk as the master and the CD as
the slave. So all went well. The machine is now up and running (PIII-500, 1x6Gb
HD, 1x15.5Gb HD, 1x 40X CDROM, 256Mb RAM, 8Mb Video) and seems to be nice and
responsive.

Cheers,

Paul

[1] I definately recommend these people (personally) since they have a good
turnaround on custom machines and don't over charge, the above machine which came
with the 6Gb and 128Mb was around $1600 with a 3COM ethernet card.

Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> On May 3, Paul Wain wrote
> > All,
> >
> > Quick question....
> >
> > Normally when I install a machine I tend to put 2 IDE disks on the same
> > channel, and the ATAPI CDROM on another channel.
> >
> > However Im getting a new machine in a day or two which will end up with
> > 3 HDs and an ATAPI CDROM in it. So a simple (I hope) question before I
> > start: whats the best way to install a CD and HD on the same
> > IDE channel? That is, if I make the CD the slave will all work or do I
> > need to do it the other way around? (I remember something about this a
> > few months back but cant recall what it was in the context of).
>
> For such a config the CD needs to be slave (I read somewhere that some low-end
> CD drives don't properly operate as master when another slave device is
> present).
>
> --
> Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
> --