CD-RW Drive

The advantage of having 2 CD media drives in place, obviously, is being able use 2 CDs at the same time & being able to copy direct from CD to CD (though this sometimes requires having SCSI CD drives).
There is software that can do basically the same thing without 2 drives (it'll dump a 650MB image on your hard drive, then immediately ask you for a blank CD and dump it on there), however that takes slightly longer.
There is no problem having 2 internal CD media drives in place, as long as your case has room & everything is set up properly. Hell, you've paid for both of them.

In answer to your 2nd question here's a quick summary..

• CD-RW ('Re-Writeable')
  Lets you erase the CD & copy new data to it a certain number of times.
  
• CD-R (maybe this stands for 'Recordable'...not sure)
  This is the cheapest CD media and as such the most commonly used. Once you write data to these it can never be erased & used over, but since CD-R's have such a large capacity anyway & are dirt cheap this is not a big deal (just throw 'em away & buy another one for less than 50 cents). CD-R's are the most standard & should work on some old CD drives/stereos that don't support CD-RW media.
  
• CD-music R (the 'R' again means it is writable but data cannot be erased once it's written on there)
  There is no good reason to try to use these with your computer's CD writer. CD-music-R writer drives commonly come on new snazzy stereos. By buying blank CD-music media the record industry gets a cut of the money & as such is less concerned that stereos are being able to copy their music since at least they're getting paid.

I hope that's helpful, sumac..

Very helpful. Thanks so much. As I get it, I could put the original CD-ROM back in, if my mainboard has sufficient ports, wiring, etc., to run power, audio, and whatever that third is, into both drives.

I am just now getting comfortable about fiddling with the computer's innards myself, and have put in additional RAM memory cards, which is no big deal. But basically, I don't know what I am doing in there.

There is flat cable with some kind of fixture at the end that is all tied up as it is not in use. Perhaps that is one of the elements to run an additional drive? But what about audio and power? I would have to be able to see additional gizmo ports on the motherboard, and have the correct electrical wiring/cable/connectors to fit into the back of the drive.

Is this something that I could attempt myself, or should I leave it to a professional?

Ya know, I have been thinking about your last question quite a bit (because of other reasons).

IMO the answer is: "depends on what your desire is, to learn or to not break anything" ;-)

If you have a spare computer to play with my answer is to "go for it". If not I'd get a pro.

The "I'm feeling lucky" button on computers used to be a big red one.

Your motherboard should be able to support 4 IDE devices. IDE devices are Hard drives and Optical Devices (CD-ROMs, DVDs, etc.).

The best setup is to have both your CD-ROM and CD-RW on the same ribbon cable going into the secondary IDE port. Optical devices transfer information slower than Hard drives do. So, if you have an optical device on the same IDE port as your hard drive, you could be slowing down the transfer rate of your hard drive.

I personaly prefer Nero over some of the other programs availalbe. you can use it to copy from CD to CD without writing the image first to your hard drive. Also, very good programe for doing anything else.

This is a great answer for pretty much all work with computer hardware. However, sumac, I think this is one thing you can do on your own without too much trouble, as long as you don't mess with anything else in there. Keep in mind that with relatively new computers there is no physical damage you can do to your hard drive/CD drive by setting up cables wrong, so long as you don't get wildly creative. If you don't get things right the first time it's not gonna break anything, it just won't work.

If it doesn't work on one cable put it on another. If it doesn't work with the jumpers set to master, set it to slave. If it isn't working with the ribbon cable connected one way, turn it around.

There should be 4 things to set up right with your CD media drive before it will work..

• Power. (This cannot easily be plugged in wrong. it will simply not fit.)
• The ribbon cable which carries the data. (Orient it so that the colored wire, pin 1, is towards the power connector.)
• Jumper/s. The master/slave positions for the jumpers should be shown on the drives themselves. If there is one device on a cable, it should be set to master. If there are 2 devices on 1 cable, one should be set to slave. Talk of making sure the faster &/or larger drive is set as master is pretty much obsolete these days.)
• Audio cable. (Your CD drive has all the hardware required to play audio CDs without the need for any other devices in your PC...it just needs electricity. However, since most people don't want to plug in a 2nd set of speakers to the jack on the front of the CD drive, you've gotta have a cable sending the music through the computer's sound card so that you can use the same set of speakers connected to it. When playing MP3's & such, the data always goes through the system bus out the sound card, so the special audio cable isn't needed for that. However, your sound-card will likely have only one connection for a CD drive's audio cable, thus you may not be able to play audio CDs out your sound card with both CD drives. You can still just plug headphones to the front of the other CD drive though.)

Again, in the case of setting up EIDE devices like Hard drives & CD Media drives, just keep away from everything else in there & you'll be fine. You're not gonna break anything, it just won't work till you get it right. This is not the case with some other hardware.

edit: typos fixed

Monger, you actually do not need the audio cable going from your CD-ROM drive to your motherboard. In my computer i do not have the audio cables hooked up and i still get sound. If you are running windows 98 and above, you can tell it to use the digital signal coming down the ribbon cable to play the sound. If you think about it, the audio signal is data just like anything else moving across that ribbon cable. The audio cable just sends the signal directly to the sound card to be processed without the OS having to do it.

Ah. True about Win98 & above. Brainfart on my part. Thanks for pointing that out.

I just wanted to comment on this one line. Just because some cable manufacturers are a bit of a PITA and they do things their own quirky way if you make it a practice to always put the drive you want to be the master on the connector at the end of the cable you may save yourself a ton of aggravation.

In most cases with with EIDE setups you can just set both drives to the "Cable Select" (or "CS") instead of the "Master" or "Slave" setting the drive at the end of the cable will automatically be assigned as the master.