"I still can't figure why his machine has to be soft booted to make the IDE work."
The AMIGA startup cycle that allows the drive to spin up and become ready is too quick for the drive and that's why it is not registering for boot the first time. I have a Toshiba Laptop drive that is the same in my 1200. It's no biggie, resetting the AMI sends the reset/ready signals again to the drive and by that time, it has done it's self check and ready to recieve/send data so it boots.
Conner HDD were also renown for this slow sipin/check cycle.
