By bridgeboard you mean the board between the JAE 50 pin of the drive and the larger 44/50 pin that goes to the motherboard (through the metalring)? JAE 50 is the common connector in laptops, it's basically 40 pin ATA (1 to 40), 4 pin power (41 to 44) and 6 pin option pins (A to F), in this case they are used for sound and reset IMHO. Pretty common.
The problem is the faceplate. The button and pin-hole are centered, but most available drives have them at the right. The pin-hole i can do without, but the button i need. And can i simply stick or glue the faceplate to another drive? Will it hold? Will the vapor from the glue slowly destroy the drive? 8-o
As for IDE master/slave on the harddisk bus, i didn't have much luck with that, cable select seemed to work. Since the RevA iMac will not boot from any USB device and i only had a big single partition on the drive, i had to get inventive to cleanly install Mac OS 9.2 in german. Installed was an old and badly maintained version of 9.0 in danish language. I plugged in a long 40 pin cable with two ends and let it out through the CD hole. There i connected the original drive (didn't change it's jumper, which was set to a configuration not reserved or documented according to WDs PDF). I added another 6GB IDE drive and jumpered it as slave. Didn't work. I jumpered it to cable select, that worked.
I also had to provide external power to the drives, which wasn't as easy as it sounds. I had to take apart two very old external SCSI drives to get power. I hope you can imagine how my table looked like and how it sounded if all was plugged in. Think jet engine.
However, it turned out the MacOS9 would only create a single partition on the new drive. Which meant if i ever wanted to install something new/different, i would need either a new cd rom drive, or take it all apart and add the second drive again. So, how do you partition a drive with Mac OS 9? I have no idea.
I had an old installation of OSX 10.1 on another disk, so i booted that and made my partitions. Now i have a clean Mac OS 9.2 in german on the fist filesystem and another empty filesystem i can work with. :-*
Long story short, broken cd-rom drives suck. :approve: