The evidence suggests that something has failed on the blue lava card, and the Lo-Tech card is incapable of properly formatting a CF card into a bootable device. If there is a way to make a CF card bootable for the Lo-Tech card, no one has provided a working method, plain and simple. I've tried every suggestion made, they've all failed, so I'm returning it, I find it ridiculous that someone would sell a device that is at best difficult and at worst impossible to use, without documentation, support, or necessary tools.
Did the blue lava card *ever* work all the way? Or are you saying it always never worked, just the exact symptoms changed?
Most people don't have this level of difficulty with these cards. My initial suspicion was CF compatibility issues, and I'm still not sure that's entirely ruled out, but at this point I *am* coming around to the idea this is actually some kind of BIOS compatibility issue with the particular clone you're trying to use these on. It is *not* normal that wipedisk didn't work as expected.
We need to be clear about something: there is almost *nothing* to these XT-CF adapters. All they do is decode a small range of I/O port addresses into a pair of "select" signals for the IDE/CF port and run those select lines, three address lines, an inverted version of the RESET signal, the I/O read-write lines, and the 8 data lines
straight to the IDE or CF plug(*). This is true no matter who you buy the card from. There are quality difference between them (better quality cards will have cleaner trace layouts, more competently implemented noise suppression capacitors, better soldering quality, etc), but bluntly speaking when you're using one of these things it's almost the same as just cabling your CF card straight to the ISA bus. If weird things are happening chances are extremely high it's either your CF card or it's a software issue. (Either the XTIDE BIOS is misconfigured or it's somehow incompatible with your system.)
(* Some designs put a buffer on the data lines between the CF/IDE port and the ISA data lines. Generally speaking that's a better idea than not, but it makes no *software* difference.)
Maybe you need to find someone who will sell you a tested pre-paired adapter/drive combo, because that's the only way you can get any assurance that the whole widget is *supposed* to work, at least in a PC that's compatible with the XTIDE BIOS. Maybe you should get back on the horn with TexElec and ask them if you can pay them an extra $10 and trade what you bought for
SD version, because in this case you *will* essentially be buying the drive from them; it's that adapter it comes with that does the job of "looking like" an IDE device and by buying it from them they should be standing behind it being compatible with the XTIDE BIOS. I mean, I guess if your luck is in fact bad enough I suppose you might manage to find an SD card that's incompatible with the adapter, but I use these IDE/SD adapters myself (as do a lot of other people), and I've never seen a card incompatibility problem. (Old slow cards perform like garbage compared to new ones, and I'd personally recommend using an industrial or "video rated" card for higher rated durability, but I've *never* seen a card not work at all.)