Help! When boot from HD, gets stuck before GUI comes on

I have Knoppix installed on my HDD as per the instructions, using knoppix-installer (I guess that makes it Debian now). With help from a friend and from another message I posted here yesterday, everything seemed to be working fine. Last night I shut down the computer and went to sleep.

This morning I came and booted up Linux from lilo boot. As usual, it spits out a whole bunch of text before the GUI comes up. This time, though, something happened that never did before - it got stuck! The last three lines were:

Quote:

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Starting PCMCIA services: cardmgr[424]: watching 2 sockets
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean
cs: IO port probe 0x0800-0x08ff:

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And it just stopped there. The only way to get out of that was to power down with the power switch. (I'm logged into WinXP now so that I can post this message.)

I'm a complete newbie to linux, so I have no idea what to do or what the problem is. Some background info that maybe is pertinent:

I (obviously) am using a laptop - a Dell Latitude to be exact.

And since the problem seems to be connected to the PCMCIA, I'll mention that I have a firewire card in my PCMCIA, with three firewire outlets and an external firewire HDD plugged into that. Yesterday, in order to get linux to recognize my HDD, I had to use the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script that was mentioned somewhere on the internet, and then mount it with mount -t vfat -o ....

As I mentioned, I'm a total and complete newbie, so any help you can give me will be GREATLY appreciated. But please be clear and explicit in your instructions so that I'll understand exactly what to do.

Thanks so much,

V.