Installing on USB drive connected by PCMCIA card

[StevenVI]

I am interested in installing Gentoo on my laptop (Compaq Armada E500), but have only a 4.5 GB disk. The logical solution to this problem is to install on a USB drive. (I have plenty of experience installing on internal disks on desktop computers.) My disk is partitioned so that the internal disk is used for booting and swap space, and the rest of it is a Windows partition for my Win98 installation. The external drive has 30GB unallocated, which will be used for Linux.

My problem is this: upon booting the LiveCD, my drive is not immediately detected, and I am unsure how to make it become detected. Using the default boot parameters, it is not detected. Using "dopcmcia" it is not detected. Using "dopcmcia doscsi" it appears to hang when it says it is trying to mount /dev/sda. It must be done by the PC card USB port. How ought I go about doing this?

-Steven

[mwspitzer]

Try plugging in the drive after you boot up. Then, execute 'dmesg | tail'. It should give you some messages showing that it detects the device and will show any errors that occur. I ran into that once before and it ended up being something odd with the UTF-8 module. Just post the output here if you don't notice anything odd.

[StevenVI]

Thanks for replying, I'm still alive, see?

So I did what you suggested, and dmesg has me confused now. Here's what gets printed when I first plug in the PC card, in case that's of any use: (this part doesn't have me confused, it's the later part that does.)