CrunchBang Linux

My case is a little unique (or maybe it's not, who knows) in that I have an archaic Dell Latitude L400 that functions wonderfully, but I want to install Crunchbang to it because win2k (the OS it was designed for) is a complete dog.
This little laptop, however, has no CD-ROM drive and is unable to boot from USB, requiring me to use the Universal USB Installer to place a bootable copy of #! in a separate partition on the hard drive. However, the installer ran into a rather large problem: it fails at detecting and mounting the CD-ROM, because there is no CD-ROM. I tried going into the terminal and doing ls /dev and finding the device ID as the installer suggested, but that got me nowhere as well, since it didn't mention anything about a hard drive or a CD-ROM or anything it was running from (tried sda1, nothing there). A million other things looked like they flew by as well, so if there's a way to scroll up?
Otherwise, insight on this? This is the first time linux has actually stumped me.