I'm not positive if the Towns can boot from PCMCIA hence I asked, but I think it's worth a try for the cheap price it will cost me.
I don't have a fancy SCSI board in my machine, no room for one unless I ever find a loose XpanderIV... I just use the normal XVI's SCSI ports. Internal for my CF, and external for my CD-ROM.
With all that hooked up at once it might be your issue. I have my CF setup for dual-boot. Primary partition for LHES and launching games, secondary partition for SX-Window 3.1. Originally I wanted a triple-boot setup, but it appeared to be impossible. I could make as many partitions as I wanted, but if more then 2 were mounted, the system wouldn't boot without a floppy (didn't matter if they were non-system partitions).
So I can confirm 2 partitions is the most for a single device. I've never messed with an external HDD/MO. Not sure how you want your setup to be, but if I ever get a Xellent30, I'd stick with the dual-boot setup. Primary for LHES and normal games, Secondary for Xellent30. I have SX setup to not auto boot, so when I load off that partition it goes to Human prompt, then i run sx.bat to boot sx. I only really use SX for mass transfer via CD-ROM as dragging and dropping is so much faster.
