Review on Efficient Syba SD-ADA40001 Compact Flash to SATA II Adapter Card with PCI Mounting Bracket - Black by Jacob Ashman

Doesn't work in my case. I took a calculated risk trying to upgrade an old Sony Vaio laptop, but it didn't work. The BIOS recognizes the card as a removable disk and refuses to boot from it, period. I even cloned the original partition from the mechanical hard drive and played the master boot record. Bad luck. It's not that the device doesn't work, but how they do the IDE emulation is different than full-size CF to IDE adapters. It identifies itself as a card reader and your laptop is either ready to treat it as a boot device or not. Even an operating system installation disk can throw a tantrum by performing a quick I/O scan and refusing to boot without formatable media. You won't know if you don't try. If you buy one, make sure you have other ways to use the CF card in case it doesn't work. I put the whole build with two CF cards in an old external drive case I had laying around. It appears as a pair of removable media. It's better than nothing. Oh, and like a lot of people here, I had to snap off the identification pin to fit the IDE connector. never mind