It's the case with some CF cards, hit & miss. So you just have to try different cards that are able to catch up with the boot process. I had a Kingston 4GB card that did the same, but an older & "slower" Kingston 2GB worked just fine.
I never had the problem if I used the A1200's IDE directly connected to the CF adapter.
Whenever I used the CF with elbox 4xIDE or FastATA MK IV I had the cold boot issue.
The problem eventually drove me crazy so I bought a 4GB Transcend Disk On Module...
Is this related to the same issue that affects certain IDE hard drives on the internal controller where the solution was to simply cut line one on the IDE cable?
I used to have a hard drive that did this. Switch on and the A1200 booted to "insert disk", keyboard reset and the hard drive would boot. After cutting line one it would boot from the hard drive each time.
In my case I never got the purple insert disk screen. It would just sit there blank forever..
