Primary or Secondar IDE for 2 cdroms

First, you will get more and quicker responses to technical questions if you post them in the Technical Q&A forum.

Not all systems will boot up properly if you have a CD-ROM drive as the Primary Master device.

If one drive is a regular CD drive, and the other is a CD-RW, you want to have them on seperate IDE controllers anyway.
The reason for this, is that you will be speed limited when copying CDs if both drives are on the same IDE controller.

Chas

:^) Listen to him.... even on an old system you can change it to do this in the bios, but why? if you have 2 jacks open, use them both. you will get better transfer rates.

A limitation to IDE is that you cannot access both devices on an controller channel concurently and you need to set some priorities. If you plan to dupe CDs often the CD drives should be on different channels. If you plan to read/write hard drive data too/from CDs they should on a different channel then the hard drives. So you make the choice that works best for you. If neither of these options is desireable get SCSI hard drives and setup CDs on both IDE channels, this does not impose any performance limitations, but is more expensive. There is always a price, be it money, performance, expansion slots or IRQs. Choose the lesser of the evils.