Thank you Smeghead and Mister Smith.
Here is what I had to do to fix.
As Smeghead advised, lilo was messed up. so initially I ran lilo after booting from the boot floppy. It would still not complete the boot but would hang at the lilo prompt with "Fatal: No images have been defined."
I compared the /etc/lilo.conf file to another SME box and noticed that after the install, the line 'default=vmlinuz' was different than another working SME box which was 'default=Mitel-SME-up'. Changing this (with the template), expanding, and then running lilo again fixed the issue! I can now boot WITHOUT a floppy...
I hope this may be helpful to anyone else with this issue. Mister Smith, you may be able to boot without the CD if this is your issue as well

Thanks again for the responses.
Craig Jensen