I want to run Knoppix from a flash card. Unfortunately my latop does not support booting from PCMCIA. I tried booting with cheatcode "knoppix ide2=0x180 nopcmcia" (recommended for PCMCIA CDROMs), but no success.
So I decided to boot from USB and run from the flash card by using the cheatcode "fromhd". Then I can remove the USB stick so there are no parts sticking out of the laptop. Now I have a new problem: PCMCIA support is not built into the Knoppix kernel. Solution: rebuild the kernel with PCMCIA support.
I downloaded a fresh 2.6.12 kernel from kernel.org (I am using Knoppix4.0.2). According to info in the src directory Knoppix uses a plain vanilla kernel with two patches. The first one, xfs support, I don't need so I skipped this patch. The second one, a long bootcommand line, I applied. But I got an error message: the file to be patched cannot be patched with the file on the Knoppix CD! (I wonder how Klaus did this patch). Not really needing 512 characters in the bootcommandline I decided to also skip this patch. I then went on to modify the config file by setting the PCMCIA related stuff to "y" instead of "m". After that I compiled the kernel, compiled and installed the modules and copied the kernel and systemmap to /boot. I made a new initrd and copied it to /boot. Finally I put all this stuff on a USB stick.
The end result of all my efforts: my pcmcia adapter/flash card is still not seen when knoppix boots.

Where did I go wrong?