Second question -- Does anyone have an idea how to make a CF card emulate this drive?
I have an old Sony Vaio PCG-505TR. Still working fine but a bit of a PITA because of proprietary hardware.

The only way I've ever found to recognize the CD-ROM is to bring Win98 all the way up and load the NinjaATA drivers. A nuisance and has, so far, largely thwarted reasonable efforts to reload any OS with anything but the pre-packaged Restore CDs.
Your UBCD found the drive! The FreeDOS boot found it as an ASPI SCSI drive and loaded the driver - CD$$ELT1, assigning it the letter T:.
Great. It's a start and shows it can be done.
Now -- how may I find these drivers on the UBCD so I can bring them over to a floppy disk for a FD boot? How would I set up the autoexec and config files to load them properly? FDs are easier and less expensive and time consuming than CDs to work with for trial and error experiments.
Next - How would I use these drivers or find their Linux equivalents to boot into Linux and see the CD-ROM? I've swapped out the old 6GB HD for a "new" 60GB HD and would like to turn this into a dual boot Win98 workstation and Linux server.
I'm a Linux noob and don't really know if the Linux boot options on the UBCD recognize the CD ROM or not.
Finally -- and this would be the jackpot question. How can I "trick" the machine into seeing a CF card mounted into the PCMCIA slot (using a $5 PC/CF adapter) as the PCGA-CD5 (Ninja ATA) drive and boot from that CF? First, CF would be an ideal medium to work with for this project, since the machine absolutely will not boot from the USB port. Second, my proprietary CD ROM sounds like it's on its last legs and an alternative would be nice.
BTW - Simply sticking a boot formatted CF card into the PCMCIA adapter has not worked.
Thank you in advance for your time and assistance.
Jim