OS/2 Warp on old Thinkpad

A short while back, a friend gave me an old IBM Thinkpad T23, so my first thought was "IBM Laptop should get an IBM OS" so I set to work getting OS/2 Warp installed on it. First issue is that the Warp CDs are not bootable, and the IBM does not have a built-in floppy. No problem, I thought, as he also gave me a USB 3.5" floppy drive. But I also discovered that the optical drive is broken on the laptop, so I went looking for an alternate method of installing the OS. I found this thread about installing from a folder on the hard drive. So, I install MS-DOS 6.22 and copy the os2image folder from the CD to c:\temp and modify the config.sys on disk1 as instructed. I boot from the Install disk, swap in disk1 when requested, then disk2, then... Error... Kinda non-descript, as it says something about a problem with either the hard drive or the floppy drive. My best guess is that the BIOS support for the USB floppy only goes so far, then fails when OS/2 gets to a certain point of the install. I recall seeing something, somewhere, about adding USB drivers to the OS/2 floppies, so I will try to track that down and see if that works. Barring that, my only other option is probably to place the HDD into another old laptop that has a working floppy and optical drive, do an install using generic drivers, then swap the drive into the Thinkpad and update the drivers to match the actual hardware. Stay tuned for progress...