i am ridding myself of floppy drives forever. since i still run win9x [stop the laughing -- --] i need to use a tricky disk to fdisk, format, and load the cdrom drivers before running the o/s setup.

Even if you succeed, Windows doesn't boot well from read-only media like CDs. For a bootable Windows CD, you want to look into WinPE, also available in customized forms such as BartPE.