So, almost 2 months after getting my IDE card reader in the mail, and having my MPC opened up with it’s guts spilled out in the corner of my studio for roughly the same amount of time, I finally got up the nerve to install it.
Why did it take nerves? Because the power cable connecting the floppy drive to the motherboard used a floppy connector, and the IDE card reader I was installing uses 4-pin Molex. I spent some time at J.B. Saunders (Boulder’s excellent electronics supply store) trying to find a cable that would go from the motherboard with a 4-pin Molex out, but no such luck. It’s apparently a rare, maybe proprietary cable, so I was gonna be forced to splice a Molex cable to this proprietary cable, and I guess if I fucked it up I’d be left without a card reader or floppy.
My worries were completely unwarranted. As my friend Chris said, it was clip, strip, wrap, solder and tape, and voila! My MPC has a nice flash-card reader, and I can say bye-bye to the zip drive and external SCSI. No more moving parts!
Here’s a picture of the installed card reader:

and here’s a picture of the 32MB CF card showing up as mounted: