I have the exact same setup, though I haven't tried it yet. Bought the CF>IDE adapters to use with real CF cards but also got an mSD>CF to use on an old camera. My SD>CF adapter has trouble reading small size mSD cards but has no issues on larger capacity ones. It doesn't matter if I read it on the camera or on the computer. Seems SD implementation is lacking. But your experience is different, apparently.
I've read about people having similar issues and one topic that comes often is that the CF card must be set to fixed disk mode. Some claim this can't be changed with these chinese adapters (or at all, with real CF cards that aren't factory set like that -- industrial CF cards) but I haven't tried any of it yet.

zerodiagonal wrote on 2020-01-27, 22:32:

I've read about people having similar issues and one topic that comes often is that the CF card must be set to fixed disk mode. Some claim this can't be changed with these chinese adapters (or at all, with real CF cards that aren't factory set like that -- industrial CF cards) but I haven't tried any of it yet.

Assuming I buy a CF card, should I go for a regular one or an industrial one?

I use second hand industrial 30mb/s for DOS and they have been rock solid. I have heard less good things about regular CFs.

OK, I found a used 2Gb TS2GCF100I on Amazon for 16€ shipped: sounds like a deal, right?
I'm buying that one and cross fingers...

OK, time for Chapter 2:

After waiting and waiting for my CF card I found out it was out of stock. I then bought a regular 2Gb Agfa CF and voilà!
Perfectly detected and fully working.

I now have DOS 6.22 installed on it (and WFW311 for that matter, but it's a real pain to get it working properly with my hardware...).

Now the question is this:
How can I install Windows 9x on the secondary master hard drive without messing up DOS?
I'd also like to have a boot loader allowing me to choose which OS to load.

Next steps would be to install Windows XP and a Linux distro on other partitions on the same hard drive.

Thanks again!

DeadnightWarrior wrote on 2020-02-17, 10:52:

How can I install Windows 9x on the secondary master hard drive without messing up DOS?

The safest way is to physically disconnect the hard disk where DOS resides and then install Win98 on the remaining, second disk.

After Windows is installed, re-connect the DOS hard disk and then select which of the two disks you want to boot from in BIOS.

I think if you eject your CF card it will boot from your other drive, but that might depend on your BIOS. You could also try installing a boot manager, they can sometimes also offer to boot from other drives than your C drive.

digistorm wrote on 2020-02-17, 12:29:

I think if you eject your CF card it will boot from your other drive, but that might depend on your BIOS. You could also try installing a boot manager, they can sometimes also offer to boot from other drives than your C drive.

This is what I was looking for. I never used anything like a boot manager before, which one would be suitable for a system like mine?

Well, there are a few threads on this topic on Vogons, I don't have a ton of knowledge about boot managers, but on my 486 I used GAG, the Graphical Boot Manager ( http://gag.sourceforge.net/ ) , there are a lot of others but they didn't work with my BIOS for some reason (refused to boot). I hope someone else reading with more experience can add to this…

Edit: It does what you want, it can boot from any partition from any hard disk in your system