Why using a expensive emulator.
Write a routine on 8051 for reading a sector and dumping in Hex and ASCII to the serial port. and a second function for reading and display the registers of the connected IDE.
That was the way i got my ide running during developing FAT16 Filesystem and going into the secrets of Microsoft Filesystem(MBR,Prtitioning, Fats, dir...).
I use compact flash in LBA mode and up to 32MB at the moment and it is working fine.
But don't expect a fast filetransfer if you drive it with a 8051. But it is working without errors and compatible to PC which I used also to dump Harddisk content mainly the FAT and Partition tablke during debugging.