compact flash to clik adapter

[Yodster]

This is just a small project i wanted to do and had some trouble when i saw the actual connectors.
I have an iomega hipzip MP3 player. When i took it apart the actual pocket zip (clik) reader seems to be a standard pcmcia type of card but slighlty modified. it doesn't have the standard 68 pine (i think) pcmcia connector, nor does it have the 50 pin compact flash connector. In fact all it does have is a 40 pin ribbon cable.
So my question is this: what do you think the interphase type is ? Is it proprietary ? Is it a modified pcmcia/compact flash connector? Could it be an IDE connectore ?
Now the reason i am guessing its not proprietary or IDE is because that would requier at least a partial rework of iomega's pcmcia reader thus increasing costs, since it would normally need to be routed to a pcmcia connector anyway.
And as a follow up to the question is as follows: If this connector type is know, would it be possible to convert it to a compact flash connector?
was hoping to eliminate the crappy clik disk interface and use some form of solid state memory.

 

[CSoup]

could be ide, especially with the 40 pin connector. ATA is part of the PCMCIA and CompactFlash specification.

 

[Yodster]

if it were in fact an IDE connector that would pose an interesting possibility of making the iomega hipzip (discontinued atm as i understand, which makes it cheap) a portable hard drive based player.
Anybody have any ideas on how i would go abouyt testing this? wiring up the ribbon cable to an IDE cable/connector would be rather hard since the traces on the cable are very close together and it is not the sort of cable that can be sliced up easily (the plastic flat type, not the standard IDE type)
also what would be the odds of the pins on the cable being in the same order as the ide ribbon standard ?

 

[Mday]

i would not test anything out unless you use a multimeter and test out the lines from the device.

chances are it is proprietary.

 

[Yodster]

you are ofcourse correct about the multimeter part, but even if i did have one using it wouldn't help me much since i have no idea how to use it. Looks like i will need to refer to some of my electrical engineering and or computer engineering friends in school. As a chemical engineer i don't really know much about electonic systems