I got a pair of CompactFlash to IDE Adapters, which are the ones that mlord suggested, and I got a pair of 32GB CF cards. I soldered a pair of pins to the master/slave jumper holes and am using jumpers to select which is which.

They work fine individually. They work fine if the other drive is a real hard drive. (Or if both are real hard drives.) But if I try to use them both in the empeg at once, only one shows up. Boot-time detection only shows it seeing hda, and after boot, /proc/ide/ only shows hda.

Any ideas why this isn't working right? Could it be a problem with the cards? With the adapters? Position of the master and slave devices on the cable?

I'm at a total loss. I've been working on this for like four hours now with no luck.

So if you install one card only but set to slave is it still showing up as hda?

It sounds like either the master/slave isn't working or for some reason the cards you bought aren't supporting it correctly.

Position on cable should make no difference at all. It's simply a bus.

Did you remove what looks like a zero ohm SMD resistor next to the master/slave header?

Yeah, check that -- or just verify that there is infinite resistance across the bare jumper terminals.

If it shows 0-ohms instead, then you know there's a factory zero-ohm jumper soldered on there that needs to be flicked off with an exacto-knife or soldering iron.

cheers

Good call, guys! From the board's "docs":


It's working now.

I probably would have figured that out eventually, but after hours of trying to flash the damned thing (I finally had to dig out an old Windows95 laptop, the only computer left in the house with an actual serial port), I was just fed up when I got to that point and it wasn't working.

Thanks again.