HAllo!

 BG> It's the equivalent cable from an Apple PowerBook 1400. I'd expect
 BG> that most laptop manufacturers will probably carry a similar part,
 BG> and you could probably talk an authorised repair shop into ordering
 BG> one and selling it to you.  (The price quoted above is probably in
 BG> Australian dollars, so it's probably about $30 or so US).

Still a little bit expensive, I paid about 4$ for mine.

 >> Finally, he will probably have to upgrade the firmware of his Multia 
 >> for the ARC or SRM consoles to recognise the IDE controller and allowing 
 >> him to boot from the IDE disk.

 BG> I didn't think it was possible to boot from the IDE controller using
 BG> SRM on a multia (and I don't think it's possible to boot NetBSD from
 BG> ARC). Have I missed something?

Admittetly I have not tried to boot NetBSD from the disk. As long as the NetBSD
TGA X-Server is as slow as it is currently, I am forced to use a PCI Video Card
in that box, which in turn forces me to use XFree, which in turn forces me to
use Linux. Though I would like *BSD better, of course.

However, all Linux Multia Howtos stated that it was impossible to boot from IDE
disks (no matter if using SRM or ARC), but I tried and upgraded the firmware,
and voila, I could boot via ARC. So I concluded that chances are that if one
upgrades the SRM firmware to the same level, it would also be possible to boot
NetBSD via SRM from an IDE disk. This is just a speculation, however.

Viele Gruesse,
Tobias