CD Player Questions

I presently have two CD drives installed on my computer - Plextor
CD-R PX-W1210A and Samsung CD-Rom SCR-3230. I also have an IOMEGA ZIP
100 drive on this system in addition to a floppy A drive and the hard
drive. Here is the layout for these devices as noted in the BIOS:

Primary Master - [ST330621A]

Primary Slave - IOMEGA ZIP 100

Secondary Master - PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W1210A

Secondary Slave - SAMSUNG SCR-3230

FYI, my mother board is ASUS A7V133.

Now for my questions:

---I would like to have the system at bootup check the drives in this
order: A Drive (floppy), PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W1210A, and then continue to
normal boot procedures. How do I make this happen?

---Only one (PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W1210A) of my two CD players automatically
starts when a CD is placed in the system. Is there some way to make
both CD players automatically start when a CD placed in the system?

---I presently have an external hard drive connected to my system via
USB port. On this external hard drive lives my system backup. Will my
system look for this external hard drive (following a complete hard
drive formatting)should I have to resort to reinstalling this backup.
If not, what steps do I take to make it accessible to a newly formatted
hard drive?

(((NOTE: I recently had a computer melt-down. This problem caused me to
format the 120GB Hard Drive that was originally installed in my
system. After several attempts to resolve this problem, I finally
reverted to my old 30GB Hard Drive. It, too, went through a melt-down
that caused me to format it also and install a backup made May 2006 on
this system. Many have helped me get this hard drive up and working
again. Yes, I have a few cleanup tasks to complete before this drive is
back to the way I would like it to be. During this process, I lost over
a year of genealogy data and family pictures. Thus, I am contemplating
temporarily removing the 30GB drive from my system and reinstalling the
formatted 120GB drive back in the system. Then, I would like to make an
attempt to read the backup data from my external 120GB hard drive back
on the internal 120GB hard drive--hoping to recover lost data files.
(((The backup on the external hard drive was made using Acronis
software. I have learned, subsequent to all of my computer problems
starting, that one of the six floppy disks needed to reinstall the
backup files from the external hard drive is faulty. Thus, I will need
to make a new set of floppies before undertaking this task---that is, if
this undertaking is possible from a USB connected hard drive.))) That
is my reason for asking about the USB connected external hard drive above.

Thanks for any help sent my way on any of the above. Without the help
of individuals on this group, I would be in deep trouble at this point.
Thanks again and again for helping me and all of us that get stumped
by our computers and their problems.

Frog