You're correct; Etch has udev instead of hotplug... Dpkg returned an error about conflict when I tried to install hotplug.

I poked around with pccardctl and it simply doesn't even see that I have a pcmcia card plugged in. I've tried reseating the card and plugging it into the other slot just to be sure too.

It seems that I'm not the only one who has experienced this problem:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=548581
http://www.debianhelp.org/node/6637

Sadly, both of those threads never found closure.

I'll keep looking, though at this point, I'm tempted to go to a used computer junkyard store and spend $10 to get a new CDROM. The time you and I (and others from simply reading this thread) have spent on this thread has probably far exceeded $10 by now.

I've finally been able to resolve this problem with a little help from a very smart co-worker.

It turns out two things were needed:

1. Load the i82365 module. After loading this, the PCMCIA card was detected. However, once detected nothing else happened until the second thing...
   
2. Run cardmgr. This is the daemon that activates whenever a PCMCIA card is detected so that it can do its magic. For some reason, this was not running. It turns out that it appears that the /etc/init.d/pcmcia script was busted. The function pcmciautils_supported_kernel() always returned zero, so it thought the kernel didn't support it. Doing so resulted in cardmgr never running. Fixing this got cardmgr to run automatically whenever the system booted.

My thanks to pljvaldez for trying to help and providing ideas on lots of things to try. I think we were almost there!

Glad you got it sorted out. Thanks for posting the solution, it will probably help out others.