I was given an old laptop, that is missing it's hard drive. It also doesn't have a pci ethernet card, but I have a pcmcia ethernet card for it. It also has a floppy drive and a cdrom drive. It can't boot from usb ether.

I've been running SLAX (a live cd) on it for a while now. My thought is if SLAX can chroot into a union, why can't I chroot into a nfs mount? The problem is I don't have a pci ethernet card and I can't access the internet until pretty late in the boot.

If I change some of the scripts (or the order of) that initab calls and just start pcmcia and friends and then chroot into a nfs mount, or will it be too late?

(This and a lack of sleep have given me a little headache, so I thought I'd seek help.)

Go here
http://etherboot.anadex.de/

and download the floppy image. Either burn it to a floppy or make a bootable CD.

You can then do a network boot from some other machine, presuming you provide a proper environment on the server.