I'm running an HP ze4610us.
Athlon XP-M 2500
512mb ram
32mb video card.
wireless lan card via PCMCIA slot

I fails on the startup at starting PCMCIA.

Any ideas?

Mandrake 9.2 Powerpack

Drop in a knoppix disk if you have one handy, and either hit the help menu (i believe it's f2) or type:

knoppix nopcmcia

this will skip the pcmcia autodetect, and your system should run (minus the pcmcia stuff, normally). how to bypass it, not a clue, but maybe this will allow you to play with the various settings till you get it working..

Mandrake has a version that runs off a disk, would that work just as well?

I had this same problem with a couple of Dell laptops a few months back.
I don't know if I found the correct answer, but this one seems to work for me. It sounds crazy, but I had to disable the hotplug system. As I typically use the same hardware every bootup and never change PCMCIA cards while the system is running, this seemed to work for me.

best of luck
Smee

I would disable that in the bios?

No, that would have to be disabled in software.
not knowing which distro you are using, I can only tell you how to do it in slackware, which is fairly straightforward.
this will make the hotplug executable non-executable......................
Of course, to accomplish this, you will still have to boot from other media and mount your drives (you did make a boot floppy didn't you??)

I'd reccommend one of the hundred or so CD based distros out there to boot from if you've got no other choice. My personal favorite is the system rescue CD which can be obtained from sourceforge
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/s...2.iso?download

If you'll let me know which distro you are using, I can attempt better instruction on where to disable hotplugging. I don't know if it works for everyone, but it certainly worked for me in this case.

Mandrake, that's why I posted in this forum

DOH!!!
Ok........ I believe that disabling hotplugging should be about the same for you.........

Luck
Smee