What cables are needed for a optical drive

Any sata cable will work. The mother board probably came with a couple. If you are not already using them, one of those will work.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

You can get a sata cable at bestbuy or radio shack but expect to pay 10-20 bucks for a 2 dollar cable.

you may not need to buy any cables. your mb should come with two sata data cables. one for the hard drive and one will go to your cd-rom drive. on your mb there should be a few sata ports on the mb. look at the mb guild and connect your slow hard drive and cd-rom to the intel sata 3.0 ports. (most times there blue and there four of them). sata data cables are keys and so is the power plug from the power supply. once the sata data and power is conencted to your hd and cd-rom drive you can boot the system up and change the boot device to cd-rom and boot from your new sata drive to install windows. your system should play audio cd fine trough the data data cable without the need of cd audio cable. to burn cd and dvd you need to download or buy a burner software.

Do Intel boards seriously only come with 2 SATA cables?

It has nothing to do with intel. It has to do with the package that the mother board manufacturer puts together. Often if the board is around $50 for amd or intel you get 1 cable. If the board is around $100 you get 2. And if the board is around $150 you get 4.

This seems to be the standard i have observed ove the past few years and 10 or so mobos.

Thanks for the replies, I'm relieved to find that i do not have to buy anymore cables.