Hi everyone

Now I'm confused:
I got hold of two other CFcards and while one of them showed the same symptoms (refused to coexist with my master HDD) the second one worked just fine (16 Mb Lexar CF):

empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hda: TOSHIBA MK6014MAP, ATA DISK drive
hdb: LEXAR ATA_FLASH, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: TOSHIBA MK6014MAP, 5729MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=12416/15/63
hdb: LEXAR ATA_FLASH, 15MB w/1kB Cache, CHS=251/4/32
empeg-flash driver initialized

I am absolutely sure that the three CF cards are formatted the same way (FAT), as I have done this using my digicam.

Here are the results using the other two cards:

(64 Mb Sandisk CF):
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-64, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-64, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-64, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-64, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-64, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-64, ATA DISK drive
ide0: unexpected interrupt, status=0x80, count=1
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-64, 61MB w/1kB Cache, CHS=490/8/32
empeg-flash driver initialized

(8Mb Sandisk CF):
empeg single channel IDE
Probing primary interface...
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-8, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-8, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-8, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-8, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-8, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-8, ATA DISK drive
ide0: unexpected interrupt, status=0x80, count=1
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-8, 7MB w/1kB Cache, CHS=245/2/32
empeg-flash driver initialized

I have ruled out Hijack role in this (I got the exact same results after having uninstalled Hijack), so I think it might be Sandisk's implementation of the IDE interface that might be different than Lexars.
It may be that the Sandisk cards cannot be slaves to another drive - I will try to figure that one out...

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions - this board is excellent....

By the way - do you know if I have to rebuild the kernel to get FAT support in there ?

Regards
Nicolai