booting from CF-Card

Hi there,

what I want to do is to boot my linux from a root device on an compact
flash card. My target device does not boot from the compact flash
card, strangly it is detected as an ide slave, although I configured
the jumper on my ide - cf adapter card properly. Anyway my target
device has  a flash disk on board, which can boot. A linux kernel and
loadlin.exe fit there, so I thought I try it that way. Now I have
problems when chosing the compact flash card as a root device, the
kernel mounts the ext2 partition I created there and then fails with
"cannot create initial console". Another way would be to boot a initrd
image from within the compact flash card, but I don't know how to
acomplish that. Maybe I put an initrd image on the booting flash disk
which then mounts the image on the compact flash card, which then
becomes root. Any Ideas?

By the way, I can access the compact flash card through a linux rescue
disk. The compact flash card is not recogniced under dos/freedos.

Any sugestions would be highly appreachiated. Thanks!