CF cards are not so great supporting master slave mode, they can conflict even if setup ok and corrupt data.
They are not so reliable, but this could also be caused by the cd-rom drive.
try a newer cd drive as slave.

You need to get a IDE CF adapter that has slots for two CF cards on a single unit.

I have the same problem with Kingston CF cards with dual slot adapters.
Transcend ones that are marked industrial I have no problem with.
Haven't tried normal Transcend CF cards but would assume they might not have that problem with slave\master too.

Thanks guys, I'll pickup some of these dual ones off ebay. I'm alittle sad as the Monoprice ones are nice with a backplate but I'm still not able to set a cd-rom as the slave if the CF adapter is primary.

Have any of you been able to setup a CF adapter and card as the master and a cd-rom as the slave and they both work without issues?

Hmmm so it might be the cards and not the adapter?

The last time I used two devices was on a 386. CD-ROM and CF card.

The brans of CF card I use are mostly no-name / cheap cards from eBay Asia.

I know some off brands don't put the fixed disk flag set on. Which can cause problems depending on the controller.
My packard bell is running x2 8gb CF transcend industrial cards with an adapter, the CD-ROM gets plugged into the Secondary IDE port.

brandsizzle wrote:

Thanks guys, I'll pickup some of these dual ones off ebay. I'm alittle sad as the Monoprice ones are nice with a backplate but I'm still not able to set a cd-rom as the slave if the CF adapter is primary.

Have any of you been able to setup a CF adapter and card as the master and a cd-rom as the slave and they both work without issues?

I almost always use CF adapters (with back plates) in my older builds for data transfer purposes and the configurations I used so far:

386SX16: 210MB Maxtor master / 512KB Sandisk CF slave (CD-ROM on SCSI)
386DX40: 3GB Quantum master / 512MB Sandisk CF slave (CD-ROM on SB)
Pentium MMX200: (Primary) 80GB Seagate (jumpered for 32GB) master / 2GB Sandisk Extreme II CF slave
Pentium MMX233: (Secondary) 2GB Sandisk Extreme II CF master /Asus CDRW slave
Celeron 466: (Secondary) 2GB Sandisk Extreme II CF master /LG DVD-RW slave

My only issue is with an old SIIG ISA IDE controller. Which was detecting the card at bootup, but was not allowing reaching it under DOS. Other than that, had no issues at al.. The adapter that I used are not same brand(?), not purchased from the same person, and generally cheapest available (I did not pay anymore than 3-5 USD shipment included for each).

brandsizzle wrote:

Have any of you been able to setup a CF adapter and card as the master and a cd-rom as the slave and they both work without issues?

I'm also using a CF card as master on a cheap-noname-ebay adapter and a cdrom as slave, on a 386 that only has one IDE channel. No weird behavior so far and it has been heavily used for quite some time.
Haven't ever tried setting the CF as slave though...

My CF adaptors have a jumper to set as master/slave and work fine.
IDE0 has a HDD as primary and a CF card as slave
IDE1 has CF card as primary and CD-Rom as slave
CF cards are always sandisk 8GB