As a PSA, I was able to get my buddha to recognize a compact flash card through one of those chinese ebay ide adapters. Originally I had a Sandisk Ultra II 2gb card. The buddha didn't like it.
I went to fry's to get an adapter to hook it up to my windows machine so I could change that bit, but they didn't have any for some bizarre reason. While I was there, I picked up some 4gb kingston elite pro 133x CF cards. They were on sale for $13. They worked the first try with no trouble. I'm currently copying 3.1 to the card as I type. It remains to be seen whether it's bootable, but I think it should be.
brian