OT: BIOS upgrades and booting without a floppy drive

[thomas at cs.wisc.edu (David Thompson)]

Bart Schaefer wrote:
>I see there's a D865GBF BIOS upgrade on the Intel site, dating from
>May.  Problem is it comes only as either a Windows installer, or a
>bootable floppy -- and not only does this machine not have a floppy
>drive, but the case configuration is such that the DVD-ROM drive
>blocks access to the floppy connector on the motherboard, so I'm
>looking at minor surgery just to stick one in temporarily.
>
>Is there any clever way around this?  Some way to make a bootable CD
>from the floppy image, for example?  Or must I grit my teeth and bring
>out the screwdrivers?

If you're set up to do PXE, you can boot a floppy image over the network via 
PXELINUX/MEMDISK and get rid of the physical media altogether.

http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

Dave Thompson
UW-Madison