Well, I used to have a bucket in my office and I knew
exactly how hard to toss a 3-1/2" diskette so that it would wind up in that bucket. And I would open a box of 10 of those disks and routinely find that 4 of them were unusable. So, I would not place much
faith in a 3-1/2" diskette. They are not well-made
(per contra, the 5-1/4" type were sturdy as sin), and fail without recourse or warning.
What you should plan to do is to, at the very least, put the necessary material onto a recordable CD-ROM. Or perhaps a USB-connected pocket drive (which is what I use). If things go south at the wrong time, what I do is to reboot from a CD, then use the external media to fix whatever went wrong.
While it is "interesting and informative" to build a bootable floppy, and a good learning exercise (and LFS is intended, in part, to
be just such an exercise...), I don't think of it as a step you would necessarily do routinely when putting a new system together.
Also... one of the most frequent causes of the
necessity to "boot from a floppy" is when the boot-loader does not work. In the LILO days that was a serious problem because, if you forgot to run LILO before typing the
shutdown -r command (unfortunately, there is no
no_waitaminute command
...) you were hosed. But if you use
grub instead, that's no longer an issue. It is well worth the time to learn what grub can do, because you can actually
fix boot-problems on the fly. Very handy. If you accidentally glitch
grub.conf you can still boot, manually.
