Ok, so Thomas hooked me up with a network adapter and I've been getting my ps2 ready for use with free mcboot and a hdd. Unfortunately things have been slow going. I managed to install fmb along with a hdd loader image on to an IDE drive, but it kept randomly screwing up and I had to pull the drive and start all over. I have stacks of old IDE drives lying around, so I tired them all.... getting various issues from each one. I don't know if it's my USB adapter or what, but anyway I'm done with IDE... too much hassle. So sata is an option, but I'm guessing in a few years sata will be just as hard to deal with as IDE, so I'm skipping over right to good old sd cards.
So to do this you buy a 44 pin ide (laptop) 2 sd card adapter off of ebay and then a 44 pin to 40 pin to adapt it up to standard IDE size for the network adapter. Now if you want to load games onto the SD card it should be as easy as putting it in a sd card reader and doing the proper format right? Wrong. You'll run into issues that most people think are only fixable by using a sd card to sata adapter. I've found a work-around for first time installs... it's goofy but it works.
First note that if your ps2 is already modded you don't have to do all of this... you can format the "drive" on your ps2 and then just use hdd raw copy to add images on the pc. This is for people who are starting without free mcbooted memory cards.
You'll Need a sd card 8gb or larger, Winhiip, HDD Raw Copy, a disc image with the hdd version of free mcboot and hdloader on it, and finally any games you wish to install to the HDD.
1. Insert the SD card into your computer and format the card as ntfs.
2. Open hdd raw copy... the source should be your free mcboot image, the dest should be the sd card.... yes this is out of order... do it anyway.
3. Open winhiip. Select the sd card as the drive... it'll complain about a missing ps2 boot record so let's fix that.
4. While still in winhiip, select Utilities/Repair Ps2 Drive. Start the scan... it'll probably finish instantly so save the changes.
5. Now the drive should show up as a proper ps2 drive.... you can now re-open hdd raw copy and add as many game isos as you want.
If you try to just open winhiip first and format the sd card as normal you'll get various errors because an sd card is removable media and some of the operations that winhiip tries to do aren't allowed on removable media. So yeah, it's basically a goofy work-around, but it works.
Since SD cards aren't very big (well the cheap ones aren't) I'll be streaming most of my isos via network share from my computer and any games with stuttering issues or whatever will get ftpd to the ps2.... it's just easier this way.
I hope this helps some people out. It's especially useful if you don't want to bother with memory cards and wish to use virtual cards on the hdd as the pc is the only way to format the hard drive and get free mcboot on the ps2.