Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the small triangle pointing to the left most pin indicate pin 1?

I think the problem is that OP cannot orient the adapter inside the caddy with rigid adapters due to lack of vertical clearance.

This 2.5" IDE male->female extension cable would permit the needed flexibility.

https://www.cablesonline.com/644fetomaide.html

yeah, i missed that arrow as i was focusing on the 44 pin connector. one would presume that, likewise, the 44 pin connector has pin 1 on the left which is correct for my caddy. further confirmation because i'm still stuck?

The cf card is keyed to only go in the correct way.

Usually, these adapters are basically just dumb passthroughs. The orientation of CF Pin1 should coincide with adapter pin1.

The suggestion with the above cable is to permit you to flip or rotate the actual adapter around inside the caddy to make it fit, by putting 90deg folds on the cable as needed.

Hot glue / mounting tape, or similar can secure the end of the ribbon at the correct position to align with the connector inside the laptop.

well, mystery partially solved. i went ahead and inserted an actual cf card and the system will post now. i wanted some assurances that i didn't plug the 2.5 ide to cf adapter in upside down before testing anything else. problem is my laptop has a 1024mb bios limit and the smallest cf card i have is 2gb; whereas, i have a stack of 1gb sd cards. for some damn reason this adapter just doesn't want to work:

the cf to sd adapter works just fine in a 5v pcmcia reader as well as a usb 3.0 card reader. i wonder if it has anything to do with the udma so prominently stamped on the adapter? my laptop only supports pio modes so maybe the adapter isn't falling back from udma? maybe another cf to sd adapter will work...i've seen others with red & blue labels so maybe they use different chips/firmware? just damn. i hate spending more on overpriced cf when i have stacks of small sd cards.

stanwebber wrote on 2025-07-02, 15:37:

well, mystery partially solved. i went ahead and inserted an actual cf card and the system will post now. i wanted some assurances that i didn't plug the 2.5 ide to cf adapter in upside down before testing anything else. problem is my laptop has a 1024mb bios limit and the smallest cf card i have is 2gb; whereas, i have a stack of 1gb sd cards. for some damn reason this adapter just doesn't want to work:

The attachment 77f4e658-f57b-4617-9685-7145462b8e71.101a30b1b5bf266cb68192e40e38e23d.jpeg is no longer available

the cf to sd adapter works just fine in a 5v pcmcia reader as well as a usb 3.0 card reader. i wonder if it has anything to do with the udma so prominently stamped on the adapter? my laptop only supports pio modes so maybe the adapter isn't falling back from udma? maybe another cf to sd adapter will work...i've seen others with red & blue labels so maybe they use different chips/firmware? just damn. i hate spending more on overpriced cf when i have stacks of small sd cards.

The issue is likely the SD card itself and not the adapter, not all SD cards can be used in these adapters or even as drives in older machines due to the newer transfer protocols the cards want to use.

Ran into this issue myself but with a CF card that was trying to use a transfer protocol my retro rig simply didn't understand, dropped back to a older CF card and it worked just fine.

You may have to try a good number of SD cards in the adapter to find one that will work with it and the laptop.

I have never had a success with chaining SD->CF->IDE.

I might just be very unlucky, but for me at least, I have never had a success.