[USB] a laptop, a usb pcmcia card (solved)

Hello you all.

I'm trying to install Linux (any distribution) in a laptop. In order to reuse a 160Gb disk I decided to make it external and to plug it to the laptop. Since the laptop just have USB 1.1 built-in, I bought years ago a pcmcia usb card to upgrade the laptop.

And here comes the problem: I am able to install any of the most recent distributions but I am not able to boot the system. When the system is booting, the pcmcia is detected but just after that the booting proccess attempts to access to /dev/sda5. Since the USB is not recognize for the pcmcia (but it will be a few lines later) I get a kernel panic.

I have tried everything I know (which is not too much): i have downloaded the latest kernel and tried built-in the pcmcia and usb support with the same success: none. I think there is a sort of problem with the kernel source in that case because it detects the pcmcia card, gives support for it but too late for the booting proccess.

I was thinking about to reuse the gentoo booting livecd but it does not work as well. I get an error message because /dev/sda5 is not a reachable partition.

I can not do a 'dmesg' (or I do not know how to do it) so I do not know which hardware is detected but I have seen the the yenta driver loaded during booting.

I would appreciatte any help. I do not know which is the next step: talk to Linus to change the kernel? Buy another laptop? (Ironies)

Thanks in advance

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Edit: I have solved this problem by using 'initrd'. Please have a look here, where I explain what I did

check out this post from mandrake forums it is long but does step be step process for exactly what you want.

http://mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=23958

or if you have a harddrive in the actual laptop (even a small one) you could put your /boot partition there and everthing would boot then you could figure out how to get the harddrive working for /.

Thanks spencerf!

I can not believe that I could not find that before ... probably because I was not looking at the right place!

I do not know if it works but it looks nice.

I am getting some trouble creating my own initrd, but I hope I will have it soon

I will post here if I get that working.

Thanks a lot.