CrunchBang Linux

Hey everyone. My dad just gave me an old IBM Thinkpad R31 and I'd like to install some minimalist Linux distro on it to make the most of its specs, which are a little paltry by today's standards. CrunchBang seems to fit the bill (at the moment I'm trying to get Lubuntu to work on it, but it hasn't worked out too well so far -- after a successful install it can't seem to detect the hard drive. I guess if all fails I'll have to resort to W2K?). To my knowledge there is no way of getting the R31 to recognize and boot off a USB stick, so I'm looking for workarounds. I guess one way of doing things would be to get the ISO image for an older version, back when they still fit onto a normal CD, and upgrade from there, but I'd rather not do that if there is a more intelligent solution. Is there?

I'm sorry if this question has come up dozens of times before, which wouldn't be unreasonable -- I did search the archives but there didn't seem to be anything relevant to a situation like this.