I have three regular internal hard drives but space for only two in my computer. Is there any way to hook the third one up through a USB, firewire, or even one of the CD bays to use it as a back-up drive???

you can get brackets to mount a hard drive into one of the CD bays.

Can I then just hook it up to the IDE cable used for the CD?

I would imagine it would if you have the right jumper settings but dont quote me on it, Never tried. Wont hurt anything by trying.

If it doesnt grab yourself a controller card. This will allow you to hook up another 4-8 hard drives.

-Xperties

Some older CD-ROM drives cables may not work with newer hard drive connectors. Just look at the number of pins and match them for the correct configuration.

Since the hard drive will be used as a backup drive I would buy a cheap bay drawer. If security is an issue get one with a lock. The advantage is you can remove the hard drive whenever you want to and store it if needed. If the hard drive is hot swappable you can also swap other hot swappable devices like the CD-ROM, Zip, etc.

External cases are available for hard drives but you need to match the hard drive to the case's configuration.

MSNwar - The FatMan

Switched the drive for a HDD, it worked flawlessly. I set the jumper to slave as I already had a master HDD. Now I can connect to Parallel, serial, USB, PCMCIA(laptop), it is a mobile 60 gig drive.

BB