2 Hard Drives in 1 emac!?!

Things are pretty tight inside the eMac. I would be surprised if you could find the room to cram another HD in there. The power supply probably wouldn't be a problem, but cooling might be. I think using an external Firewire drive would be a better solution.

To answer your other questions:
IDE cables are available up to 36", but the longer they are the more likely you are to have probelms. Most experts say to limit yourself to 18-24" cables.

Master/Slave/Cable Select are settings for drives on an IDE channel, sort of like the SCSI ID numbers. Like SCSI IDs, they are set by the use of jumpers on the drive. Basically, if you have one drive on a channel it is typically jumpered as "Master" (or in some cases "Master without Slave"). If you have two drives on a channel, one must be "Master" and the other "Slave" or neither will work properly. The terms "Master and "Slave" really don't mean anything, since there is no master-slave relationship between the drives. Cable Select is a jumper setting on the drive where the IDE cable tells the drive whether it is master or slave, depending upon which connector on the cable it is attached to.

I just spent nearly 2 hours trying to get my HD out of a used eMac I bought for my son. I saw no room to add a second. Get a firewire external so much easier

Lew Archer wrote:
I have a 1.0g emac that has a combo drive in it. I am about to put in a superdrive, and a 200gb hard drive. I was looking around the web and found this...

http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/eMac/eMac-upgrade.html

Any one know if I can get a long IDE cable and add the new 200gb HD to the existing configuration? In other words I would have 2 HDs inside of my emac. One drive being the original 40gb plus the new 200gb.

This cannot work. There's space inside an eMac for exactly two ATA devices: one hard drive and one optical drive. If you want two hard drives, you'll have to live without your nice new Superdrive, because it will not fit if there's a second hard drive. Period.

And if so do you think I can fit both inside of the emac?

No. The reason for the long IDE cable is so you can knock a hole in the eMac's side and run the cable outside and plug the other drives in there, as there's no space inside for them.

And if so should I have and 2nd power supply for the new 200gb HD?

if you have the new drive in to replace the old one, you should have no problems. As there are only two Molex plugs on the eMac's power supply, you would need to hack additional power plugs if you add additional drives. The power supply may/may not handle the additional requirements.

And would the current fan keep everything nice and cool? And how should I arrange the "master" and "slave" thing. And what the **** is CableSelect) anyway? And would I need to deal with it?

Your lack of knowledge about M/S/CS indicates that you're unlikely to have done serious hardware work before. Messing with an eMac as your first major hardware project is a Very Bad Idea™. There's 25,000 volts on the monitor and if you don't know what you're doing you can get seriously injured. (It's low amperage, so you're unlikely to die unless you have a heart condition. You're gonna know you were nudged, though.) Experienced hardware techs tend to avoid playing inside CRT monitors or inside all-in-ones like eMacs and iMac G3s which have CRT monitors built in.

Lots of questions, I know. Thanks.

It would be much, much, much simpler to buy an external FireWire drive and plug it in.

I can recommend the Western Digital 500gb MyBook Premium (Firewire and USB 2). I have one for my eMac 1.25ghz G4. Just plug it in, run Disk Utility to format it as HFS+ (it comes Fat 32), download and reinstall the Utility software that came with the drive (Macs version this time of course)and Bob's your Uncle.

No reason whatsoever to climb inside her (your eMac I mean). The MyBook looks sexy too.

you could use a 2.5 laptop hard drive, im not sure where you would put it, but its much smaller and will generate less heat then a 3.5 hdd, you can get 3.5 to 2.5 ide adapters.