Back in 2009 I connected a CDROM drive to the IDE connector and booted Puppy Linux V4.2 without any problems. I also connected a 2.5" drive running Tinycore V2.7.
On this revisit I used a Compact Flash card and IDE-to-CF converter. I started off trying Tiny Core 8.2, but this got stuck having got as far as firing up the GUI. It left me with a mouse pointer in the middle of a black screen.
I wound the clock back and sampled a few early incarnations of Tiny Core. I found that 4.7.7 worked as did 5.4. Tiny Core 6.4 didn't. I haven't looked to see if there is an explanation for this behaviour.