The only position that is critical to Windows is the Primary Master. It will be the C drive and will be the one it looks to for booting up.

You can use a third party boot manager to have multi boot capability or to boot from a different drive.

Second, as stated previously being on the same IDE cable only affects data flow through the cable. The Master has priority over the Slave. However, the Slave is an independent device.

Win98 does not have native RAID control. If you want a RAID system you have to buy an add on RAID controller. However for an effective RAID system you are going to want RAID 3 at a minimum. RAID 1 (mirroring) only protects you from hard drive failure. Viruses etc. will kill both hard drives in a RAID 1 system. Also, slow hardware degradation will affect both because the RAID 1 driver will not distinguish between good data and bad.

Personally I still think that it is best to use a good back up software or even a shareware copy software for data and ghost or a similar tool for the entire system. The latest ghost even allows you to image to and restore from multiple CD's and the restore time is awesome. If you restore from a hard drive it takes about 20 minutes or less to get your entire system back from an image. I am not sure of the time from CD. Of course this time is dependent upon the amount of data you have on the drive.

Hope this helps.