Quote Originally Posted by kynn
Well, part of the problem is that I have no idea where to find any hardware information for this computer .....
Dell Computer Corporation
GenuineIntel
Pentium(r) II Processor
Intel MMX(TM) Technology
128.0MB RAM
I'm not a Dell expert, and one of the reasons I do try to avoid them is that they sometimes do very strange non-standard stuff. Still, I'm very surprised that you say a Dell of this apparent vintage does not support booting from floppy. I have just booted Knoppix on a far older Dell, just to be sure it would work (a Pentium I 166 mhz w/ 64 meg of ram), and it boots from CD fine (you have to go into setup, do an ALT-P to get to the second page of the setup, and tell it to boot from the CD first rather than the floppy). Certainly a newer Dell sould also have this support. You can also get more information if you look at your system case to find what model of machine you have, you can then find more information on this system at the Dell website.

I also see no reason from what you posted that would account for SBM not working with that system, but I'm not convinced yet that the computer does not boot from CD natively.