Laptop Hard drive, IDE cable, CDROM and some guts

[whisper]

Ok, I have a Magitronic 7500a Laptop, with a Hitachi DK211A-51 hard drive (from now on refered to as the 'HDD' ) And what i'm trying to do is this;

- Attach a standard, desktop PC, IDE cable to my HDD, at the same time the HDD is connected.
- Make the HDD slave, and the CDROM master.
- Burn a special copy of Morphix linux designed to run in console mode (and light GUI) only.
- Boot from the morphix cd, mount the HDD and use both.

My original idea was to put wires in the top of the female connector for the HDD, and then plug the male pins on the HDD in, holding the wires in place. However, after some discussions I have found out that different ATA rates, need different cables, so I have no clue if what i've done will even work (even to boot from cd). You can find out what i'm talking about here http://www.members.shaw.ca/thewhisper/projects.html

This was my first attempt, and a rather uneducated one, I decided not to even attempt plugging it in, until I had more inforamtion regarding the cable itself, and whether or not it was safe to plug a laptop HDD and desktop CDROM into the same cable, at the same time.

What I need to know is, a) any restrictions/walls in my way that I should be aware of, and b) if anyone has done this before, or worked on something simular, I could really use some tips.

In further thinking perhaps the HDD should be master, cdrom slave, and just have a bootloader on the HDD boot the cdrom.... any thoughts will help..