hd question

so i am building a new computer and going to use one ide cable and put the cd drive as the primary and the hd as the secondary. well once i get windows up and running i have files on another hd that i want to transfer to the new hd. can i simply unplug the cd drive and plug the ide into the other hd, boot up the computer as usual, and transfer my data, then turn the computer off and switch it back to the cd drive?

Yes, that would work.

I don't have experience with multiple drives, but based on what I know, if your transferring form an HD that was used in a different system, make sure that BIOS boots up from the HD that is already in the system. Since both HDs have windows installed, if that's the case, booting from the old HD, windows will try to load up drivers and stuff for hardware that doesn't exist anymore(which was for the other system).

I'm not sure about other motherboards, but on ASUS if you hold F8 on boot-up, you can select which device to boot-up from (So in this case, you could select the newer HD).