Old Flakey the laptop turned out to be too flakey to put win98 on. Or maybe it was a sign.

If anyone's interested, the solution I finally reached to configure a replacement empeg drive was:
  1. put the old drive back in
  2. install a developer 3.0-a11 player image using upgrader
  3. add the new drive as the IDE slave hdc
  4. connect to the empeg via the serial port using minicom
  5. manually partition and format the new drive (including mounting the music partition, hdc4, and creating the fids and var directories as specified in the formatting guide)
  6. transfer the root partition containing the player image to the new drive: dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/dev/hdc5
  7. remove the old drive and set the new one as IDE master
  8. reboot

It came up with an empty database and jempeg created a config.ini file. It's now been synchronizing happily for about 24 hours. Hopefully 3.0a11 turns out to be relatively stable. I started work on a bash script to create a duplicate music tree which will symlink mp3s and convert oggs, but I'd rather not.