As a quick hack I wrote a standalone program for the ARM SA-1110/SA-1111 platform I was working on. It basically boots a kernel and a ramdisk from an IDE drive in the CF or PCMCIA slot. It's designed to replace the kernel in flash memory and be booted by a boot loader like 'blob'.
I've only tested it with a 1Gb IBM Microdrive in the CF slot and several different PCMCIA IDE flash cards. It works reliably for me. Your milage may vary. Please send comments, diffs, etc... to me.