I used a Debian etch netinstall disk with a pcmcia ethernet card on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 445cdx. After rebooting, the installed system doesn't see the card anymore.
dmesg and lspci show nothing related to pcmcia.
The 486 kernel is installed.

You don't have enough information there for us to be much help ... We need to know the model of the card. Is it an "ethernet" card, or a "wireless lan" card. There is a difference, you know.

The best advice is probably to start over with the installation installing Lenny instead of Etch. Etch is so old it aches at every joint. People "in the know" have long since switched to Lenny.

Certainly it handles lots more hardware than Etch, but I'm pretty sure your card could be made to work on Etch as well. Not worth the effort in my opinion, though.

I had used lenny first, it didn't work either, so i tried etch.

The card is a D-Link DFE-650 Fast Ethernet 16 bit PCMCIA card, it is the card I used for the netinstall.

I also have a Netgear MA401 wifi card, both will work for a netinstall of either version but are not recognized by the installed system.