lhuser, little buddy you are wrong.
He needs to use 80 wire udma/ata133 cables. Round and shielded would be the cable of choice. Modern systems can sense the cable and will limit the speed the device on the cable can go. So if he uses a 40 wire cable with a device that can go udma 5, it may only reach to udma 3 or 4. Not the full potential of the device.
And if the bios is set to auto configure it will retrieve the data from the chip in the device and set itself up. You CAN manually configure a drive but unless it's an older than dirt drive why bother?