raoulduke said:

it's only when the Card's inserted that it freezes.

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So it's back to booting okay now, without the card?

Could some weird PCMCIA issue have screwed up the IDE bus?

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Pretty doubtful. I don't think those two buses are connected in any way. The only thing I can think of is a plain old electrical short in the PCMCIA slot has scrambled your PRAM or something. Do you have an external SCSI drive or CD you could test-boot from?

Try doing a PRAM reset, aka power manager reset.

http://www.amazon.com/Digigear-PCMCIA-adapter-supports-memory/dp/B00MFVG9XO/- This is the culprit.

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Uh, yeah. There's your problem, as they say ...

Output Interface 32-bit CardBus Type II PC Card

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Cardbus cards are not backwards compatible with PCMCIA slots.  You want an absolutely definitely 16 bit only PCMCIA card.

NB, you won't have any of these issues with a 2.5" IDE/ATA-CF adapter.

... provided you can get the thing to boot at all now, obs.