jkgamer:
thanks for your research 
i don't have either a USB floppy or USB CD-ROM, so i couldn't possibly have accomplished what you have. i'm in the middle of preparing a Win98 hard disk for mine, which i'll have to complete tomorrow or Sunday. then, it's time to put the whole doggoned thing back together again (whoopee! <not>)
i did notice that the secondary IDE port is available on the motherboard, so adding another cable and routing it outside of the chassis somehow would enable adding an IDE CD-ROM. from his pictures, it looks like jsmmd has a CD-ROM slot in the front of his unit, or maybe it's just a pre-cut area where one was intended to go. my unit has nothing like this at all, so it would be time for Dremel surgery and power supply Y-adapters.
just ignore the rest of this, you beat me to it with your noapm post
if you can get to the LILO boot prompt, you should be able to use these boot options to skip the hardware check that's hanging you up (swiped from Knoppix' cheatcodes.txt file)
linux no{apic,agp,apm,ddc} Skip parts of HW-detection (1)
linux no{firewire,pcmcia,scsi} Skip parts of HW-detection (2)
linux no{swap,usb} Skip parts of HW-detection (3)
good luck, and keep us informed of your progress !!
keith721
but the unit works fine. it doesn't appear that the phone works, unless i've got a bad cable somewhere. also, the multi-function keys across the top of the keyboard don't cause any actions, probably because the Avant AOL software interpreted these. i've got the same Seagate ST34313A disk drive, and Debian only reports 62M memory here, as well.