If the drive spins up, that's good; Just removing the CF card is good enough, you don't need to remove the CF socket. If you soldered the header on, double check for good solder connections. If the IDE header was already on, check for removed pins (other than the middle keying pin), as I had one once that had pin 16 clipped and had to cut out the black plastic base to re-solder a new pin on.
I have seen a couple that just refuse to recognize a hard drive, I had one that worked fine then a few months later it wouldn't do anything. I ended up destroying the IDE header in an attempt to fix it and now it just boots off the CF card. One thing to try is to be sure your IDE cable is good, this is easy to check but just take time to ohm out each line with a ohm meter esp if you made the cable yourself as it's easy to get one of the 44 lines off whack.
I have found bad solder joints on the header by attaching the IDE cable to the GCT and ohm out the connection through the IDE cable which will confirm if the cable connections are good. One more thing to try is I had one person whom I soldered a header on for claim that the IDE header pins wer too short and barly made contact with the IDE cable; what they did to fix it was to use a razor blade knife and shave the header down so that the pins would seat further up into the cable header.
Thanks on the congrats for my newest little one, we are all doing great. Getting use to those 3 am feedings and diaper changes are going to take awhile to get used to!! (My other two children are 12 and 11, this one was a unexpected surprise!)
