Preface: this was originally several posts, but I decided to conjoin them into 1.
Trying a different card could certainly be a possibility (in fact, I haven't actually checked the LED's to see if the master light came on when inside my comp). As for the formatting, that was done with winhiip to begin with. I'll try some things out and post an update here soonish.
Update: I put my spare CF adapter (without the CF card) onto the PSU berg, but only the activity light lit up.
I then put my CF card into the adapter and plopped it into my comp -- the master light still didn't light up from the time I booted to the time I was forced to set a different boot device (having it as master makes it number 1 in the HDD boot order).
After that point, I began to defrag my CF card and was about to repartition it (this might've been useless now that I look back on it) when I realized something glaringly obvious; I've had the special V12 HDLoader0.8c.elf on my computer, but I don't think I ever bothered to install it. /facepalm
I'm going to go do that now (been forever so don't expect a post right away). I have 2 different versions apparently, so I'll need to see which one is to be used. Wish me luck!
Update 2: I just finished translating some german (turns out the V12 0.8c installation is german), and I'm still getting the same error as before. I get the feeling the .elf doesn't have anything to do with not being able to see the HDD, but I'll go ahead and install this to see if it fixes anything.
Update 3: It's as I thought; changing the .elf didn't have any effect on the HDD being recognized. At this point, the only options I see are to pick up a cheap CF (no money currently) or to try and contact the HDLoader devs to see what they think of all this. I can try to resolder everything, but I'll hold off on that for a week at the very least.
If anyone has any other troubleshooting tips, I'm all ears. This is a pain mostly because we're not even sure if it works to begin with, but if enough time passes and nothing pops up, I'll go ahead and solder a IDE connector on and test a regular HDD to see if the connections are good.
Update 4: I found out why the HDD wasn't being detected last night -- one of the wires had come undone (must've occurred no sooner than I had set things up to test). Unfortunately I'm having a new issue now where HDLoader wants to format the drive and then comes up with a fatal error during formatting
I managed to get the patched HDL provided in
this thread by northbear to "format", but when I went to install a game via disc drive, it said the game was too large (my CF is 32GB). I've also tried out OPL, but it didn't detect the Resident Evil 4 iso which I installed via winhiip.
In any case, this is a very, very good sign I believe, and it brings us a heck of a lot closer to CF being a possibility. I'll be looking into getting someone to make a specially patched HDL for me since I have no clue how that's done.
Should the HDL patch fail (assuming someone is nice enough to do it for me), I'll redo the wiring and *possibly* install an IDE connector so a regular HDD can be tested for troubleshooting purposes (last resort).
I'll do my own searching as always (later in the day or tomorrow), but feel free to drop a line.
Update 5: I went back to test things and still no luck. I noticed that northbear's HDL v12 patch only formatted 13GB out of 32GB, and it did it in the toxicos format -- winhiip also detected partition errors and said something about a checksum, but when I clicked to correct it winhiip crashed.
I reformatted the card in both toxicos and HDL 28 bit formats with winhiip and put a game on the CF card, but nothing changed: HDL 0.8c and 0.8c v12 want to reformat while northbear's reformats but doesn't actually work; OPL doesn't detect any games.
