Ok, so I searched around a bit, and found lots of posts in other forums for people wondering if they can install 3rd party drivers from something other than diskette. From personal experience, I know ...

My ASUSP5Q Pro Turbo mobo does not support an internal floppy disk drive. The manual states that under Windows XP, you need to use an external USB floppy drive to create the required Raid driver disk.

About a week ago, Linus Torvalds made a software commit which has an air about it of the end of an era. The code in question contains a few patches to the driver for native floppy disc controllers.