I've recently added a network card, so I can use a router to get on broadband, and it works fine for that. But to get it working I needed to disable rc.hotplug. The downside of this is that I'm now lacking the use of some hardware, particularly my USB PCI card. If I enable rc.hotplug then thing just hangs on boot. Is there anything I can do to get the useful parts of rc.hotplug working for what I need? I'm assume this is what is preventing the USB card from working.

I'm running Slackware 10.0 with a 2.4.?? kernal as I far I know.

Try this, boot into linux one time with rc.hotplug running if possible, to get a list of all modules loaded for your hardware. lsmod to find all the modules loaded, then go back and disable rc.hotplug by doing /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug stop and chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug. With the output of lsmod, go into your rc.modules file and look for the modules that were listed in lsmod and simply uncomment the listed modules. Hopefully this should work. The only downside obviously to disabling rc.hotplug is when adding new hardware. On my old system (AMD K6-2 450MHz) I have to disable rc.hotplug to speed boot time up, from 2 minutes to just a few seconds.

Also I just wanted to add, how long did you wait for rc.hotplug to finish when you added your new card? I know that maybe waiting 2 or 3 minutes extra may seem like a lot, but if it finishes within that time range, then it means that hotplug just needed more time in probing your hardware. In either case, still I hope this solution will work for you.. *crosses fingers*

I'll go and try that tonight.

I went out and cooked my dinner while waiting for it to boot, so getting on for an hour!

One other thing you can try, if you absolutely can't get past rc.plug on boot, is try finding your card manually in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules by it's chipset name, and then uncommenting it. See the documentation of your network card.

I managed to find which parts of rc.modules to uncomment to get the usb side of things working, though it was rather limited. I found that by using "/etc/hotplug/usb.rc start" seperately (I kick it off in rc.S) seems to get all the usb things working. So I'm kind of bypassing rc.hotplug that way now.