USB booting :: is autodetect proc different on USB installs?

I'm not sure this is the right forum for this question- if, not please move it.

I installed DSL 2.0 on a 512MN compact flash card via a USB card reader/writer, using the Tools->Install to USB Pendrive->For USB-ZIP Pendrive procedure.

I then put this compact flash card on an EPIA 800 mini-itx board with a IDE CF adaptor. DSL boots up fine.

My question/problem is this: I have a Linksys USB Wireless card that I've used on my other DSL 2.0 system (a normal HD lilo install) simply by running the prism2 from the DSL panel.
On this compact flash/frugal system install, no dice- prism2 never returns.

I'm wondering what different init path this USB-ZIP/frugal install takes of the HD install.

Here's the boot options from /proc/cmdline:

ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt24.gz nomce acpi=off noapic quiet frugal restore=hda2 mydsl=hda2 toram ftp ssh nfs host=tunebox BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix BOOT_IMAGE=linux24

An lsmod | grep prism2 returns this:
prism2_usb 61916 0
p80211 22412 0 [prism2_usb]
usbcore 58016 1 [hid prism2_usb usb-storage]

An lsusb yields:

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 066b:2212 Linksys, Inc.

And the ifconfig for wlan0 looks like this:

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

I'm kinda scratching my head at this point.
I did read the doc that talked about the DSL init sequence, but it doesn't cover the sequence for frugal installs.

Thanks for any ideas,

Mark

I ended up doing the traditional HD install. I'm not crazy about that, as it's on a CF card in an IDE adaptor, but at least the network card is working.

original here.