You are correct about the cable, but I need to correct you about how the IDE's are setup.
Where you place the Master & Slave drives on the cable is not important, unless you set each device to cable select mode.
Normally, these devices are set to Master mode by default when you buy them. Just manually set whatever your second device is to Slave mode, and place it on the cable *it does not matter if it is the middle or the end*. Your bios will detect them correctly.
I've been doing this for years, and in fact I am running my sytem optimally under a setting which you said would not work.
IDE 0,0 ATA-100 HD (on the middle cable, set to master)
IDE 0,1 PIO-0 ZIP (on the end of the cable, set to slave)
if this didn't work IDE 0,0 would report as a ATA-33 drive.
Hope this helps