Controlling shutdown behavior.

I've run into a small problem on my laptop. If I connect an external SCSI drive to the system (via pcmcia controller), the system "locks" when it shuts down. I'm guessing it's turning off PCMCIA services before it umounts the (manually mounted) /dev/sda1 drive. 1. Is there a shutdown log file that can be viewed? 2. If PCMCIA is shutting down before the drive umounts, how can you control the order that the services/devices shut down? Thanks in advance, Steve