Changing boot order of devices...
 

Here's my problem:

My wireless card won't load because debian inits PCMCIA last. The WLAN0 interface and the ndiswrapper driver are invoked before the PCMCIA gets a change to load at boot. I'm hoping this is why its not working. :P I changed the name of the PCMCIA file in r0.d (and many other rX.d) to a lower number but it didn't help.

Thanks for reading.

I am pretty sure that is not your problem. Can you explain what is not loading? Are the modules not loading? What is the output of dmesg just after booting?

I hope I'm not breaking forum etiquitte by jumping in on this thread, but I'm having an almost identical problem. I have Sarge installed on a laptop using a wired nic in my PCMCIA slot. Upon studying the boot process and "a little help from my friend" (sorry but I'm listening to the Beatles right now and it just came out) I noticed that the network services are being started by scripts referenced in the rcS.d directory. After that point the boot process switches to runlevel 2 and uses the rc2.d scripts which include the PCMCIA service. When start-up tries to bring up eth0 I get a message saying "no such device" and my nic's lights aren't lit up untill after the PCMCIA services start. So I think it's safe to assume that that PCMCIA needs to be started before the network service. Is the answer something as simple as moving the R#pcmcia script from rc2.d to rcS.d and assigning it a lower number than the network?

I found a solution to my problem and you might want to check out the thread where I was working on it, it may work for you Netinstall problems, cannot connect to internet we address the issue in the second half of the thread.