Death of a Floppy, or BIOS Flash Help, or Booting DOS From USB

So I built a new Athlon64 XPC and have installed Ubuntu on it. It is
working very well, though Shuttle managed to hose up the Gb ethernet
implementation just a bit, requiring a BIOS flash to fix it. The problem
is that I did not (and do not) want to install a Floppy drive on this box.

The BIOS flash is provided as an MS-DOS executable and a firmware image. I
would like to be able to do one of the following:

- Boot from USB pen drive
- Boot from CD-RW

I do have a dd'ed image from an MS-DOS bootable Floppy disk.

I can find lots of instructions on the net for installing bootable Linux
distros, but can't locate any specific instructions for creating a
bootable DOS image on USB or CD from Linux.

It would be nice if it were as simple as this, but I doubt it:

dd if=msdosdisk.img of=/dev/sda
mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/
cp biosupdate.exe /mnt/

I've never had luck creating a custom bootable CD, I find it funny that a
Floppy image is required for it.

Has anyone done anything of this sort? I've seen Windows applications that
let you update the BIOS from within the OS, are there any Linux native
apps that compare? How do you handle BIOS/firmware updates, or how do you
think they should be handled in a day when the Floppy drive needs to die?

- David A. Riggs