I plan to swap out my ata cable in my Rev A iMac with a 2 drive cable so that I can run the extra connector out the Mezz slot to a drive in an external housing. I have read this should work but my question... All the cable I found have the moboard connector and the far end of the cable. Can I flip the cable around and put the end labled master into the MB and the one marked "slave" to the internal, which I want to stay master, and run the one labled MB out the mezz slot to the external drive which I'll set as slave? It seems as long as the jumpers are set correctly to master and slave, the cable markings should be irrelevant. , that should override the cable.

I can't answer the question of jumpers and master/slave issues with reversing the cable, although I don't think it would work. My question is, what kind of external drive are you talking about? There is no such thing as an external IDE/ATA drive. There are only internals. You could have a bare drive external as long as it has power, but I wouldn't recommend that. Also, the IDE controller chip may not support master/slave, but I don't know for sure.

To the best of my knowledge, you are limited to USB, or a SCSI drive through a USB adapter.

I bought an external case with a fan and power supply. I plan on running the ribbon cable to the drive through the hole on the back of the case where the connectors would usually go.

That's a very interesting idea. If you get it to work, please post that here. I have some friends with Rev A iMacs that might take advantage of it.

I was curious from your first post and did a little digging on the master/slave thing but came up dry. You might just want to pick up a cable and test it. I doubt that would hurt the machine. A cable can't be more than a few bucks anyway.