Alright, long story short I plugged in this 5 gig disk wrong to my desktop on the converter, fried.
Now I want to still use this machine. My idea is to have a floppy disk that I insert, which then calls the flash drive as root partition (old BIOS doesn't boot to USB). I'm just mostly wondering the best way to do this: What all I should have on the floppy disk necessary to make it call the /dev/sda1 root partition, and thus render the floppy unneeded until next boot.

I am very comfortable with custom building kernels, so if I need to make one small enough to fit on the floppy and have the necessary driver to call USB, I can do so.

My current idea is:
Floppy (ext2):
LILO (/dev/fd0)
/etc/fstab
/sbin/init
and the standard glibc.

Is there an easier way, do I need more, etc. ? Note that this system can not boot to burned CDs.

Thanks,
Dave

well I do not understand what you mean by fried drive.
How did you fry it and what have your tried to recover it?

2) have you considered ultimate boot cd?

yes I know you claim it does not boot burned cds but that is more an issue with your config of burner....you can make it burn to iso9660 standard with 8.3 filenames so maybe you can have another look at your burner?

3) and while we are at it, since you have a floppy drive have you considered flashing your drive so usb in enabled?