OK, so I've been given a USB floppy drive with a disk in it containing 
some BIOS utilities. Which works - after you enable booting from it in 
the BIOS. But it's not exactly "fast".

My plan? To convert this into a bootable CD or maybe a USB drive. But how?

After much Googling, I discovered that there's an option to mkisofs 
which makes it to El Torito floppy emulation. So I can basically take a 
raw disk image of the floppy (which is only half full anyway) and make 
an ISO-9660 CD image out of it.

So I booted up a VM running Debian Squeeze, and... mkisofs isn't a 
recognised command? Seriously? OK, well maybe I just need to install it. 
Er, no, the package manager claims to have no knowledge of any such 
program. Wuh?! There /must/ be a way to install this, surely? Don't tell 
me the mighty Debian doesn't support something as common as CD burning...

Well, Squeeze has /nothing/. But checking Lenny, I find a package that 
at least /contains/ the binary. Except it isn't a binary, it's just a 
symlink. The package documentation says "This is for compatibility only. 
Please use genisofs instead."

OK, so for some reason they've renamed a standard Unix tool to another 
name. But with identical functionality. Um, whatever. (Isn't this from 
the guys who bought us Iceweasel, which is identical to Firefox?)

So, I ask genisofs to build me a CD image. First it complains that I 
haven't added any files. Which is fair enough, I suppose. So I create an 
empty folder, and tell it to use that. But now it complains that it 
can't find the floppy image - even though it's /right there/!

Eventually I hunt through the manpage, and in the small print I discover 
that the floppy image has to be /in/ the folder that you're making a CD 
out of. (Presumably it shows up as a regular file on the disk, in 
addition to being the boot code. Or something.) Once I moved the floppy 
image, everything worked fine. And you know what? The CD boots and works 
perfectly.

So now the guys from the USA can have their USB floppy drive back. I've 
got a CD. ;-)

I wonder... would copying the CD image to a USB drive actually work? I 
rather suspect not. I've never actually seen any PC boot from a flash 
drive, ever - although I keep hearing that it's supposed to work...

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