I tried to install OpenELEC on an MSI K8MM-ILSR (MS-6741) motherboard using a CompactFlash to IDE adapter (also tried a regular HDD) and I had to use a USB drive to make it work. I did not try it yet but I guess my DVD drive also connected to this IDE bus won't be recognized as well.

You try with which release of openelec ?

The lastest Daily Buid (Generic non-OSS but OSS too as well)

Where have the daily build downloads gone? When i drill down into the directories they are empty.

In order to focus "testing" efforts development builds have been suspended while we are in the 2.0 BETA > RC > RELEASE cycle. They will resume some time after 2.0 is shipped and the 'Frodo' codebase stabilises.

NB: The root cause is probably missing VIA chipset drivers. If you can boot from an Ubuntu Live image and tell us (via a driver request on the github issues tracker) which driver is required, we can look into adding them to a future release. I should point out that really old hardware (KM800 is c.2003) is not a focus for the project so there are no guarantees it will be added. Generally a "less minimal" distro like Ubuntu is a better choice for old hardware.

I encounter trouble to boot with my 4coredual-sata R2 too.

I understand that you want to keep openelec lighter but can I compil from the source to enable the missing via modules ?