Sorry, posted while you were replying ;-)
SCSI CDRoms can be found cheap (around £10 + p&p), and all drives fail sometime, usually due to the moving parts wearing out. It's a boon having a CDRom for the first time, so don't give up now!
Again, stuff like having to manually edit the startup-sequence isn't unusual I'm afraid, though the squirrel setup oughtta be able to do that.