The bad news is that the CDRW of FreeSBIE wouldn't boot from the CD drive. But I did get it going. And an attempt at a hard drive install failed. Evidently I may need to adjust partition sizes. I tried using it as a LiveCD but it seems to find and ignore serial pointers too, dagnabbit.
The good news is that a boot managing floppy does its job quite well. I think
_dakko pointed it out to me a while ago. This does exactly what it claims to do. I made a floppy from the downloaded image and use it to get to the CD that wasn't booting. So the night wasn't a complete waste. At least I have a boot floppy that will let me start from devices that aren't fully cooperating.