Ah, you mean Method 2 on
this page.
That did help somewhat.
I've changed my strategy towards this problem: I removed the USB drive and installed to one of my backup HDs. That went flawlessly.
I then plugged both the HD and the USB drive into a second PC, and copied the installation to the USB drive.
Then I followed your advice, and the KB article above, and copied the MSDOS.SYS file from the USB drive to the floppy. In retrospect, I probably could have copied the original MSDOS.SYS file that was on the USB drive when I installed there, but that's in the past.
Now I'm getting the Win98 splash screen, but now have the following error:
"While initializing device IOS:
Error: An I/O subsystem driver failed to load.
Either a file in the .\iosubsys directory is corrupt,
or the system is low on memory."
to which I reply "Keep on hackin'"