I could never get the compact flash and the cdrom on the same ide cable to boot.
Can you say what brand IDE-CF adaptor and what flash card you used?
I mostly use Sandisk cards but in this case I used a Centrios card (Radio Shack, I think), the cdrom is a Matsushita CW-7586-B. The IDE adaptor was $1.00 Ebay special that was made to go into one of the expansion slots of a PC. I couldn't get an IDE cable long enough to reach from the header to the card slots to the CD, so I removed the expansion cover above the header and modified the adapter so it would fit. I had to install the IDE cable backwards to make it reach. The adapter has the name Proconn stamped on it, but that may be just the name of the connector. I'm using IDEFix97 to see the CDROM.