Sony Vaio external pcmcia cdrom/wireless

[Guest oiper]

Hey, this is my first real post here, so go easy. I've experienced the pcmcia failure after running updates like some of you have. I now have a solution that I found here that should correct the problem. But my question is more about the pcmcia service in general.

 

I've put Mandrake 10.0 on my father's Sony Vaio. It has one pcmcia slot availible. So during the cd install, I can not have his wireless card detected/plugged in. This has been fine. I can reboot with it plugged in, and get it working. My confusion is about the hardware detector.

 

Upon booting after install, and after replacing the cdrom's pcmcia card with the wireless 802.11b card, the HW detector asks if I want to deal with the absence of the cdrom drive. I said no. So now, more or less, it finds and sets up my net card..... But, at the end of setting up the card, it wants CD 1. So I must unplug the card, and plug in the cdrom drive. But the cdrom drive no longer powers up.

 

I wish I had slept more the past couple days so that I could articulate myself better than this. My confusion is multiheaded. I know that the pcmcia service is supposed to handle "hotplugging" pcmcia devices. It should be able to do it all day long. I do not know how to handle the hardware detection when prompted about the absence of the cdrom device. Note that upon a reboot, the hardware detector will no longer ask about the cdrom device if I said "no" before, and then my pcmcia net card won't start up at all! And THIS failure is before the failure that updating gives me.

 

If anyone has managed to stumble, coherently, all the way through that, you must be a genius. So please, if you can clear up any of that, or know someone who can...

 

Just for those of you who forgot the point by this time:

"How do I handle having 2 devices for one pcmcia slot in relation to the hardware detector and in relation to failed pcmcia recognition(which is actually a failure to even spawn any system messages until yenta_socket is probed, and the service restarted.)"