Problem booting a Sharp PC-9000 w/ no HD

I have a Sharp PC-9000 that no longer has a HD (it basically eats them). I use it when I travel, to access the Internet, and usually boot up DOS and use Arachne. However, I thought it would be nice if I could use linux instead.

This machine has the "interchangable" floppy & CD-ROM drives. To use both, you hook the floppy up to the parallel port.

I made boot floppys on another PC, and was able to get Knoppix to boot to the point where it attempts to find the Knoppix CD to continue the process. At that point, it is not able to detect my CD-ROM drive.

Does anyone have any suggestions for this type of machine?

Thanks!

An update. The CD drive in question is a Matsushita, model # UJDCD6731. I considered attempting to recompile the Knoppix kernel, but could not get a make menuconfig or make xconfig to run. Poked around on my Debian box, and noticed that there is a place in the menuconfig that pertains to non-SCSI and non-IDE CDROM drives. Matsushita is one of the ones listed, so I feel like I am onto something, but don't know how to accomplish this (make menuconfig) with knoppix.