If you're a bit like me you hardly ever use floppies anymore. In fact, I use the /mnt/floppy mountpoint for temporary mount. Chances are you will find a smb filesystem of 30 gigs mounted there, but not a floppy. So when I needed to test the above, I found my floppy drive defective from all the dust it had collected over the years.
All went well after I replaced the drive. But it made me wonder if I could use a USB stick for this purpose. This turned out not to be that hard at all. The installation system I booted, a bareacpi.i kernel, had all the USB modules it needed. All that was missing were some SCSI nodes in /dev. And offcourse we all know how to create those by hand.... don't we? Well I had to google for it but never mind that. I used the following commands to make two SCSI nodes:
mknode /dev/sda b 8 0 mknode /dev/sda1 b 8 1
After I made those nodes I could mount my stick as usual: mount /dev/sda1 /pkn
I imagine things will be different when booting a SCSI kernel... but all my SCSI systems are production servers un-availlable for testing ;)