Hi folks,
Today I found something interesting you might like to know. Some CompactFlash, even with the CF logo, doesn't appear to support True-IDE mode. The specific flash that we had was a Memorex branded flash that, when plugged into an IDE port, comes up in BIOS with a "32M CHH" name.
The funny part is that it forces itself to be the slave device. Here I am with a Geode board with an integrated CompactFlash socket on the secondary master IDE and nowhere to plug anything else in, and the flash comes up as the the slave drive. If you put it into the "normal IDE" to compactflash adapter board and try to run it as master, the thing isn't even recognized.
This was fun to find, as it was simultaneous with a new flash creation tool that uses the Win32 SYSLINUX to create bootable Linux CompactFlash with a minimum of work from a Windows box. When it didn't work, the initial finger was pointed at SYSLINUX. When I pulled all the flash and checked them all, I soon realized that the only flash having problems were those that came up with a "32M CHH" tag, and they all had a 021 mfg code on the side.
These CompactFlash do say "Copyright 2000" on them so I suspect that they were manufactured more than a few years ago. They do, however, have the CF Association logo on them. None of the other Memorex-branded flash I've got has this problem, so I hope that its just some leftover crap from the early days.
Anyway, cheers. I hope someone else someday finds this useful to know.