Of all the exotic ( mysterious? bizarre? ) cables that were included with my new Enermax power supply, one thing that was missing was any kind of adapter or connector for a floppy drive. Furthermore,my Asus Striker Extreme mobo doest not not have floppy power adapters either!
But lo and behold, you can both boot from, and flash the bios from a USB key drive. I know this works, 'cause to store the bios file I just grabbed a random USB drive out of a drawer. At the BIOS setup, the built-in bios flashing utility transparently read the filesystem, and even let me select which of the xxx.bin files I wanted to flash. Yea!
However, after the flash and reset, instead of just posting, I got a few screens of text, which finally stopped at a "1.>" prompt. I was confused, because at this point, the "system" was just cpu, ram, video card and the USB key. Then I remembered that a year ago I had put a Linux kernel on the key drive as an experiment. It had not worked then, but this system happily booted. So I had accidentally built a fully functional diskless workstation :)
