how to make usb stick look like usb floppy drive?

[MichaelBurns]

accidental double post; not sure why

[MichaelBurns]

@Joshua:
If you can tolerate the noise from a very brief access to your optical or hard drive that occurs only at the very beginning of the boot, then Plop may be the way to go. I wound up using Plop for my solution (although noise wasn't at all a concern for me). I didn't notice much noise from it. It probably spun for about a second to load the Plop boot loader, and then jumped right to the usb. (I modified the configuration file before burning so that it would boot automatically to usb.) I was even able to eject the Plop disk within seconds, well before Ubuntu was anywhere near finished loading. After that, it was all completely silent from the usb (and the godaweful noise from my cpu fan, which begs the question: is your optical drive really such a noise problem whereas your cpu fan is tolerable?).

[Joshua]

I was planning to use the thing as a network music jukebox in my kitchen that would play a slideshow or something when it wasn't doing anything else. My goal was to make it small and to boot VERY fast. So I planned to strip it of anything unneeded (including the optical drive) and mount it on the wall or something (maybe digital-picture-frame-style).

I see how I could use the optical drive, or another hard drive, but even disregarding the noise, either of them would slow the boot process because they have to spin up before use (I expect spinup to be a bigger delay than reading the data because there will be very little software to load). I'm starting to think I'll just use a flash card mounted in place of the hard disk. I have an unused 4 GB compact flash card laying around, and I found this to make it look like a normal hard disk. I think it will be worth the $10.

As far as the CPU fan, I'm planning to scale the processor to half speed (1.6 GHz to 800 MHz). Hopefully that will almost eliminate the fan noise.

[Joshua]

Sorry, duplicate post. Is there a way to delete these?