Installing 5.4 on a HP Omnibook 5500CT laptop

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

I have this old laptop, a HP Omnibook 5500CT. Long ago, I chenged the
original disk for a 20G one, so it has space enough. It has been
collecting dust for a couple of years (it had FreeBSD 4.9-RC on it..),
but today I decide to put it back to use again. I decided to split the
disk between FreeBSD 4.11 and 5.4. 

The machine doesn't have a cdrom, so U installed from floppy and ftp.
The FreeBSD  4.11 install (see attached dmesg) was no trouble at all 
(it needs irq 11 for the network card - a Billionton PC Card detected as
"ed1").

Under 4.11, the controller is detected as:
pcic0: <Cirrus Logic PD6729/6730 PCI-PCMCIA Bridge> port 0x3e0-0x3e3 at
device 3.0 on pci0 pcic0: Polling mode
pccard0: <PC Card 16-bit bus (classic)> on pcic0
pccard1: <PC Card 16-bit bus (classic)> on pcic0

and 'pciconf -lv' says:
pcic0 at pci0:3:0: class=0x060500 card=0x00000000 chip=0x11001013 rev=0xe2
hdr=0x00    vendor   = 'Cirrus Logic'
    device   = 'CL-PD6729 PCI-to-PC Card host adapter'
    class    = bridge
    subclass = PCI-PCMCIA

But both 5.4-RELEASE and 5.3-RELEASE fails to detect the pccard
controller, and thus leave me without a network card to install from.

I have searched the FAQ, Handbook and elsewhere on the net, but didn't
find anything.

What can I do to fix this?
Any help appreciated.
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway