Emergency Repair Disk/Boot disk history?

[leericmarvin]

I have noticed that the ERD utility in W2K can ONLY create a ERD disk on a floppy drive. No capability to be re-directed to a CD ROM, harddrive or Network resource. In view of the fact that many Laptops, and now some low end desk computers are elimenating Floppy drives all together, and soon it will be industry standard to not offer a floppy at all. How is the ERD to be created? Let alone be use to recover from it? Is there any USB based floppy drives which can be booted from? Is anyone knocking on Microsoft door to make updates to ERD utility? Also, on the same note, many BIOS's are update via floppy.
Is there any tools, utilities, hardware changes on the horzion, etc that I should be made aware of, in this regard?