I have 2 hdd one 80 gig and one 160 gig. I would like to sett hem up as a primary and secondary master with one dvd burner master and one cd rm/dvd rom slave. How do I do this? do I put one hdd and one optical drive on one ata cable and the other set on the other ata cable? I want 2 bootable hd drives. One with win xp and one with linux. Should it look like this:

primary master-HDD
primary Slave: DVD Burner
secondary Master: HDD
secondary slave: cd-rw/dvd-rom combo

actaully you can do it any way you like but the slowest step is the burning and if and only if you do a lot of burning consider putting the burner as a master and so you then have to consider either linux as a slave to ms(heh heh).

Due to deficiencies in ms you are better off keeping ms as a primary on first controller and linux is comfortable being a slave on the first or slave on the second.

read my tut on how to dual boot if you wish

Right now I have linux and windows (Linux was on first)on 1 hdd primary master and one cd-rw/dvd rom as secondary master. I really want to have 2 bootable hdd with linux on 1 and windows on the other, but how would that work with an added dvd burner? Should the burner be primary slave with one hdd and the cd-rw as secondary slave with the sencond hdd as secondary master or should both the cd-rw and the dvd burner be set up as dvd burner secondary master and cd-rw as secondary slave?

primary master-HDD
primary Slave: HDD
secondary Master: DVD Burner
secondary slave: cd-rw/dvd-rom combo

or

primary master-HDD
primary Slave: DVD Burner
secondary Master: HDD
secondary slave: cd-rw/dvd-rom combo

If everything is already booting it sounds like you should just be able to add the burner to the machine and everything would keep working.

Doesn't really matter at all. Just have the disk order fixed and stick to it. I would put the DVD and CD drives together as they run at a lower speed.

I am running 5 disks. Over 140 systems. You can see the partition arrangement in my signature on the 145 systems.