My Battlefield 2 "patch" has serious podged things up big time, so I'm having to do yet another fresh install of XP.  Again I'm going to have to go through the nightmare of SATA support, but I really have no patience to be transplanting the floppy drive from my dad's PC to make things work.  I remember the topic of using a flash drive to install SATA/Mass Storage support in lieu of a floppy was brought up.  How is this pulled off?

Sorry, I missed your post. I give you a summary of what i did.

I installed a special versian of MSDOS on the stick, like those you find in boot disks, BIOS flash utilities, etc. that boots a seperate MSDOS running in memory.

Then off that DOS, I run a program that emulates a floppy drive and voila, a floppy drive on USD stick. This is how I flash my BIOS's and boot from floppies. Keep in mind that XP never runs during any of this. Think of it as a kind of knoppix, it runs entirely off the usd stick and memory.

The actual process is more complicated then it sounds and is risky if you don't know what you are doing. How you would get it to work during an XP install is beyond me.