I've stuffed around with similar things before and had varying success - on A4000, 600 and 1200 - with a lot of hair-pulling frustration to go along with it! And if you google search and so on there's all kinds of non-matching opinions on what can and can't be done, and how to do or not do it!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAaaarghhh!
Maybe ATAPI is simply not compatible? Maybe you need a buffered interface?
Perhaps try with and without IDEFix? (My experience is that I've not needed it from memory).
With the "no disk present" scenario did you try "Diskchange CD0:" to see what happened?
What happens if you only have the CD drive connected and you boot from floppy to mount the drive? Does it work fine?
I have recently had a HD and CD on the IDE header on my 4000 while tinkering with 4.1 Classic and it worked fine....but...a few months before I had trouble getting a CF card and CD (not sure if it was the same drive as when the HD was connected) on the IDE header to play fair! I'm not sure on the spec of the CD drive that worked though (IDE/ATAPI
).
You say there is a boot delay of 30 secs as "if nothing is on the bus". From memory if there is nothing on the bus you get the opposite effect - no (or very little) delay. Maybe the delay is because it is trying to "detect" it but can't?
One approach, given you have had SOME success, is to connect the only CD drive you say worked fine and tinker using that one in varying combos of software/configs and so on and see what happens?
If it helps I have a fair few hardware bit that I can try for you and report the results.
Good luck!
