It looks like PCMCIA isn't the way to go in your case.

If you go into the BIOS. What boot options can you choose from?

At the beginning of the linked thread you mention it has SCSI. This is likely the direction I would pursue next.

not an option, no output. I suppose there has been an extension that might have a classic external SCSI port, but that is just my guess...and ebay has no results upon such a thing.

USB boot requires BIOS support, just like ATAPI CD-ROM boot, LS-100, or ZIP drive boot
the best legacy support for external CD-ROM boot is with SCSI, but I doubt there's any PCMCIA SCSI cards that has a built in BIOS, which can supplant the system BIOS in terms of removal disk/disc bootability

this is all too much trouble... it's easier to take the drive out, plug it into a desktop and ghost the drive from there!

As ive said, deconstructing and constructing that thing takes half a day, so again, not an option.

Recently I was trying to put DSL on my 486...the boot diskette i downloaded included a USB driver, that was able to boot from my USB PCI card that had an flash drive plus DVD-RW in it, DSL was in the drive and it easily booted from it. So now I cant get the driver to find the PCMCIA USB controller using the Linux floppy, but I know I can get it booting AND now I have a perfectly working DOS environment and no way of getting to boot...shit.

PCMCIA behaves differently from PCI... for one thing, you need drivers to initialize the PCMCIA controller before you can do anything with it

I thought about that in the first time, but the experience proves the opposite. I can get the DVD RW working, just being hooked up to the card and using USBASPI.SYS plus USBCD.sys. Nothing else.

I know that we have various types of PCMCIA or call it PC Card types, ranging from 1 to 3, being built around both ISA and PCI architectures, details here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card . There should be some differences between them...

There is this boot manager wich could be helpful:
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

Quoting some features:
# USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI)
# CD/DVD boot without BIOS support (IDE)
# PCMCIA CardBus support to enable boot from USB PC-Cards
# Floppy boot

The cdrom version of g4u-2.5 doesn't have the error 79, the latest floppy version that works seems to be the 2.3: http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.3.fs.zip
Give it a try!

Well THIS boot manager also promises the very similar as the SBM, though I will try it DEFINITELY. That is exactly what I seek for.

And thanks for the g4u advice, but as long as the booting from any non-nix system, I will stick to that one.

Will report back.

I haven't tried the PLOP bootmanager or SBM, keep us updated of your results.
I used g4u a few times successfully, it was quite slow on a Pentium 233MHz, backing up a 30GB (3GB full I'd say) drive took the night on the highest compression level.

I recall a local imaging utility for DOS I used on a Compaq IA-1 (some kind of net computer wich can boot from it's internal flash storage or a CF card), it's a shareware called dolly.

PLOP is a failure too, though very interesting design 😀. It detects nothing, whether I provide the Socket Services or not, whether I provide my config.sys first, then the PLOP - nothing.

Will try that Dolly.

Have you considered booting to a Linux floppy like muLinux? If the network is detected, making an image should be as simple as 'cat /dev/sda | nc remotehost port'.

You can find dolly here:
http://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=14&p=14