I bought a new IDE CF Hard Drive for my ThinkPad R31, and installed a 16GB Card in it.
Image link below is a SATA type, Mine is IDE, but the same style.
http://www.darkwire.com.au/assets/images/CF_to_SATA_2.5_HDD_Case_Adapter.jpg I power on the laptop and get this error: remove disk or other media, Press any key to restart.

Also my ThinkPad 560X uses the CF adapter with the 16GB and was the only one able to read the CF as a HDD. Tryed in my 600 with same error as my R31.

Okay I found out my solution and the Compact Flash card is formated to read as a removable disk. And thats why I get this error. Now how do I format the CF card to read as a Internal disk? Do I just insert it into a PC and run Windows XP install CD and format it, if it will read the CD before the error comes up.

My X24 recognizes and uses the CF card as an IDE hard drive when installing both Ubuntu and XP. It is treated like any other HDD.

My ThinkPad 560X is the only one that reads the CF card all the other ones say "Remove disk or other media.

Can you perhaps see if UDMA is switched off / not compatible with your BIOSes? I've heard that if it ain't in order, the CF card may not work.

Does anyone know whats the hightest CF card availble now. I think its either 32GB or 64GB and since everyone is buying CFs for HDD purposes now, you think SanDisk will make bigger size CFs? like 120GB-300GB. This to me is the cheapest Solid State to get. I have 3 True Solid State Hard Drives, one in my ThinkPad X41, X41 Tablet 16GB and a 32GB in my R31.

And they were not cheap $60+ for a 16GB and $100+ for a 32GB. There was a 64GB for $200

You can get 64GB and even 128GB CF cards, but they are expen$$$ive! SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB $549 I saw a 128GB card for $1395!

Some are not so pricey. This 64GB offers dual voltage support too: Wintec 64GB CF $156.29

And just think a SanDisk 1GB CF back in 2005 was $$. Back in 2007 I bought a 2GB Flash Drive for $48.00, Now I can buy one today at the store for $9.00. Around 5-10 years those 64GB-128GB will be on ebay for $12.00
A 1GB SanDisk on ebay now is probably $1.00 now if anything

Does anyone know if SanDisk or other CF manufactuer plan on making 1TB-2TB sizes? I know and own a 1TB SATA desktop drive and wanting a CF of this size for my DVD collection. I have all my Music/Soundtrack CDs on a SanDisk Ultra X2 16GB, My PC games on another and soon waiting for a larger CF for DVDs. Very good for a space saver, 3 memory cards.

Also, Using Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP Pro, Already know I can rip my music to the media player and get its Album cover for its tracks, Is microsoft working on making a DVD rip option and have the same setup? Like I can insert watch a DVD under MediaPlayer 11 and it will download/display its cover art, but no rip option. I came up with this idea awail back with the CF usage. I can even switch to another ThinkPad system and have my music/Games on it.

Also what are the new sizes of CF today now?

1TB?? I think you will still have to wait a while for that. I think the biggest capacity I've seen with CFs was 128GB (and it was horribly expensive...)

How many DVD movies will a 2TB hold on it? Movies like The Matrix or DieHard, Around 2 hours and 30min longs. I was thinking of buying I'd say if 2 SATA 2TB HDDs would be good enough if not one 1TB and was going to use my IBM Portable Drive Bay 2000 as the external HDD hookup.

How many depends to a large extent on the encoding method you use and what you save/leave out. If you rip an entire DVD ISO, you can expect a file of around 5GB. If you just rip the movie only, it will probably be around 3GB. Both assume MPEG2 encoding (the same quality/resolution as the original DVD). If you use some form of compression, like say MPEG4, the file size can be much smaller. So 2TB could hold from about 370 full ISO DVD rips up to several times more with some compression. I have some highly compressed movies that are only about 700MB in size. They don't look very good on a hi-def big screen display, but they look just fine on a laptop or smaller portable device.

I know this is another style PCMCIA card but do they make a 16-bit PCMCIA USB card? I own a Dynex USB 2.0 32-bit PCMCIA card and would like a 16-bit one for my older ThinkPads that don't support 32-bit. I do have a 16-bit WiFi PCMCIA card witch is nice to use on my IBM ThinkPad 701C. But would like a USB one aswell. Also do they still make IDE "Laptop Size HDD" Would like to buy a 1TB or a 2TB since my Portable DriveBay 2000 only has IDE and not todays SATA.

Will there be a difference in speed comparing system (linux) installed on x200 and x400 CF card (30MB/s vs 60MB/s) ?
hdparm shows me that my current hard drive speed is about 25 MB/s
(Thinkpad X30 and X41)

Yes. Not quite what you were thinking of, but with a second card, yes. A couple years ago, I found two USB host controllers for ISA cards, but I could not find any being made in PC Cards. (I wish I saved the info, because now I cannot find what the other chip was. Web search results are all garbage when I look today.) But recently, I did find one.

The ECA16 16-bit PC Card to ExpressCard adapter, sold by Synchrotech, contains Elan's VMB5000, ISA to USB host controller. Elan went out of business a year ago. And it has even been mentioned on our dear ThinkPads Forum before. (I wonder why did it took me so long to discover?)

http://www.synchrotech.com/products/media-adapters-pcmcia-memory-cards_06-eca16.html
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=56393&p=383035#p383035

To turn the ExpressCard socket into a USB receptacle, requires what I call a USB riser card, or a ExpressCard passive USB card. And such a device is not so easy to find as I hoped! I did find fleaBay mystery meat, "AKE BC268". I wish to know more about the product, but I have no real idea, only a flimsy guess: I think TVC-TECH might be a Chinese manufacturer, which might produce the BC268 card. Note, this combination of cards involves a sequence of step-down and then step-up DC-DC power supplies, and almost every USB device will step-down again. I do not suggest powering anything which spins from this combination.

Are you sure this one is a passive one? It mentions "NEC D720114 USB 2.0 chipset".