Well, here is my experience with Toshiba Portege 3480 and PCMCIA CDROM - it failed,
but when I connected an USB CDROM with a second copy of Knopix it booted first of the PCMCIA drive and moved to the USB drive looking for file system. So I think that PCMCIA driver is not started but usb is at boot time.
For some one without USB CDRM a USB memory stick can be used until, I hope developers can correct the problem with the PCMCIA driver. ( please don't flame me if everyone knows this, but reading the post, I think this is the problem)
1U Supermicro Server 10 Bay 2x Intel Xeon 3.3Ghz 8C 128GB RAM 480GB SSD 2x 10GBE
$297.00
HP ProLiant Xeon E3-1220L V2 MicroServer Gen8 2.30 GHz 16 GB RAM NO DRIVES
$199.99
HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus v2 Ultra Micro Tower Server - 1 x Intel Xeon
$846.19
HP ProLiant Xeon E3-1220L V2 2.30 GHz 16 GB RAM MicroServer Gen8 NO DRIVES
$199.99
HP ProLiant HSTNS-5151 Micro Server 8GB RAM No Drives/Key/Caddies *READ*
$94.99
SuperMicro Server 505-2 Intel Atom 2.4GHz 8GB RAM SYS-5018A-FTN4 1U Rackmount
$202.49
Supermicro 5018A-FTN4 Rack Server - Black
$125.00
SuperMicro SuperServer 505-2 Intel Atom @ 2.4GHz 8GB w/ Ears 5018A-FTN4
$159.80
SUPERMICRO CSE-512 AMD Opteron Processor 6128, 32GB DDR3 RAM NO HDD
$90.00
1U Supermicro Server X10DRU-i+ 2x Xeon E5-2690 V4 28 Cores 64GB 4x 10GBE-T 2PS
$324.00