How to Boot Floppy Disks with Grub e.g. to upgrade your BIOS

If you have a modern notebook, it's likely you don't have a floppy drive. But still, many companies offer either floppy images or windows tools to upgrade your BIOS. Both not really great for Linux users. Of course, you can use the tools of OpenBIOS, but that can be pretty difficult. Here's how you can boot any floppy directly in memory via grub:

1. You need to get memdisk. It's included in the syslinux package.

2. You copy memdisk to your boot folder:

e.g. cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/memdisk

3. You uncompress (if it's zipped) and copy your floppy image to the boot folder, e.g. to /boot/floppy.ima.

4. You create the grub entry, use your normal values for root and the path:

title Floppy Image

root (hd0,0)

kernel /boot/memdisk

initrd /boot/floppy.ima

boot

5. Reboot, select it. It should boot normally, only without the annoying floppy drive noise. Done!