I revisited this to see if I could fix my problem - namely using primary IDE you are limited to 4GB on Primary Master and with the slimmed XT-IDE you must boot off primary master. This is a limitation of the system and it will not turn on if a larger drive is plugged in. Doing this if you try to use software on the Primary Slave device hard drive performance takes a nose-dive and everything stinks. My main goal is to have a single 8-16GB IDE HD and a cd-rom drive attached to this machine.
Well I achieved such results! I have a cd-rom ide isa card that lets you pick if it's primary master/slave or secondary master/slave. I set the card to secondary master, plugged the drive in and reconfigured xtide to boot off of 170h instead of 1F0h. Doing this and moving my cd-rom to slave with the on-board controller results in user flash xt-ide booting the 16GB CF and my cd-rom still functioning! I am now free of the ethernet ISA card!
This user flash patch is the same as previous, it just is forcing the system to not use 1F0 for booting. Please note a limitation on this system is it appears to only reset IDE on the primary channel,, so soft reset no longer functions as the drive won't survive posting a second time.