So to double check both the CF adapter and CD drive are on the same IDE cable?
You want the CF adapter's jumper to be set to Master and the CD drive to Slave.
Some adapters don't have a jumper so you can try setting the CD drive to Cable Select but my success is 50/50 in these cases.
In which case you can run the CF card off the first IDE connector and the CD off the 2nd if that's an option.
Or get a adapter that does have the Master/Slave jumper

Second that.

Putting CD and HDD on separate cables is best practice, both to avoid this kind of compatibility and to maximize performance.

The CF adapter is set to master and is a simple plug in adapter so it's plugged into IDE zero on the board and the CD is on a 40 pin ide cable Set to Master on the IDE 1 pins on the board
i know sometimes CF adapters have kinda mixed compatibility with Boards but for it to be working as long as a second cable isn't plugged into the board makes we wonder if the Controller on the board is either broken or has some specific setting or jumper that it needs
and i've found limited documentation on this board becuse it's a OEM board so there not alot of documentation out there

i've got a old Quantum fireball HDD i may try and see if a More Traditional setup recognizes better
i may also try a different PSU not sure why it'd be the PSU based on behavior but maybe the PSU has a bad rail somewhere that's causing a issue as a rule i tend to use new power supplies anyway but this one seemed in good shape and had been in a working unit that was drawing way more juice from it but weird things happen with Old psu's And i'm adapting a ATX to AT so not sure if there's any shinagans that can cause

Both good idea's.
I was going to say it may be that the CD drive and adapter simply don't like each other. I've had spinning rust drives that refuse to work in the same PC so its not unheard of.

Okay problem solved i plugged in a Corsair power supply and tried a Quantum bigfoot i have around and that recognized fine , along with the CD and the cd was working fine in that configuration
then hooked up the CF drive it recognized it after a few seconds i changed back to the first PSU and it's working fine now installing windows and such
i'm guessing the issue was a mix of operator error and the HDD bus being just naturally very slow compared to other machines i've used
i think i was impatient and assumed the Bios taking a minute to access drives was it freezing because the bios didn't like the CF card
hearing a real hardrive spinning helped

now to find Packard bell drivers

PB drivers?

PB just uses generic hardware. The motherboard is an Intel NV430VX with either S3 Trio64 or S3 Virge onboard. They should be natively supported in pretty much any OS you throw at them. Apart from that there may be interesting sound hardware in there, but that's usually just Aztech stuff, generally cards with the AZT2316A on them. Drivers for that on www.vogonsdrivers.com. Only other option they used in systems from this era was a Miro Cassius card with IBM mWave DSP on it. Natively supported in Win98SE and (no surprise) OS/2, DOS is pretty simple, only Win95 is near impossible. I've never managed it and I never heard of anyone who did, even with official drivers back in the day (both from PB for the Miro Cassius and from IBM for the 'Dolphin').

Yup yup , yeah your spot on i assumed it would need motherboard drivers just for the chipset at least but yeah everything clicked on the moment i got windows on and loaded , native video is a S3 virge and yeah the card that was in the machine is a Aztech i actully during the same salvage found another aztech card from a 486 Packard bell
yeah i went with 98 Se so it would have as much compatibility as possible