Hopefully someone here has had a similar problem and can help me.

I've got a Neoware Eon 4000S (a thin client machine I'm repurposing as a
monowall box).  It has a soldered-on flash disk and an IDE header onboard.
After some searching, I found instructions on how to boot its default linux
installation into single-user mode.  Then I dd'd a monowall install on top of it
and rebooted.  The dd complained that the target disk was full, but I ignored it
on the theory that monowall is only about 10MB, and the target disk is 24MB.
The CF card I was copying from however is 32MB, so I would expect dd to complain
after about 24MB.  I ignored the error and rebooted.

Monowall booted up partway and then complained that it could not find config.xml
and was halting.  For some reason I decided to put the flash disk with the
monowall install I'd copied from back into the CF adapter in the IDE header and
rebooted again.  Monowall came up fine.

My question is:  How do I get config.xml to reside on the onboard flash rather
than the IDE flash?  Note: I cannot get into the BIOS on this machine (unsure
why - if anyone has ideas other than shift-F10 after the initial neoware screen,
I'm happy to try them), so I cannot change the boot order.  Thus, any changes I
make have to be something I can do from within monowall.

I've tried uploading new firmware, hoping to overwrite the onboard flash.  I've
tried restoring factory defaults as well.  All to no avail.

I suspect that any resolution to this will come from using the firmware upload
feature to flash a more full-featured OS to the disk-on-chip.  Can anyone give
me some pointers on compiling such a thing?  Is there some way to interrupt
monowall's bootup so I can get to a shell with, say, dd and ssh available?  Am I
just stuck with a machine that needs an external drive?

Any thoughts or pointers would be much appreciated.  Thanks in advance,

-Ben