install on new computer; no cd available

[dtutty@porchlight.ca]

Hello,

I've tried searching the archives for this but am still unclear.

My main computer (P-II) died suddenly.  I have backups so that's ok.

I got my old computer (486) running (so I can send this email and carry
on with life) but it cant' run my CD burner and with an ISA bus, it
can't do USB.

I'm building a new computer:
	AMD Athlon 64 X2, AM2
	Asus M2N-SLI board with nVidia nForce 570 chipset
	1 GB stick of ECC ram
	basic video
	SATA 80 GB Seagate Barricuda drive.
	Zip drive (most recent backups on Zips).
	LG CD/DVD burner.
	Could add a floopy if it would help.

The last installation media I have is 3.0 (full CD set, and all
floppy images and basedebs tarball on Zip disk, with backups, in the
bank (CDs don't fit).

The one thing in my backup/recovery plan I forgot was that SATA wasn't
around when 3.0 was made.  

My 486 can do two or three things:

1.	Download and make floppies.  Is there any forcast when Etch
	will have floppy-install working?  With woody, I tested that
	I could boot from floppy then install base off the zip.

2.	Make zips.  On my old computers, I haven't been able to 
	get a grub floppy to boot something on the zip.  With 96 MB
	available, is there an iso file I can put on it?

3.	I may be able to find an old IDE disk and put stuff there
	for a hard disk install and use a grub boot-disk to boot,
	but I don't know if IDE hard-disk boot works on this main
	board, since its really for ATAPI CDROM drives.

My 486 is shoehorned on a small hard drive since the P-II took my other
drives with it.  I don't think I have enough room to run NFSd although
it does run ssh.  

Confounding all this is that I'm on dialup in the country.  I would like
to know what specifically to download and try, rather than downloading
everything.  Since downloading images takes so long, and CPU prices are
coming down, I havn't actually got the guts of the computer yet; I want
to have a plan to install before I buy it (I have the case, PSU, SATA,
and my zip and burner installed).

Is there anyway to bootstrap the bootstrap; boot up with the 3.0 CD
(assuming it boots), then from the shell of the installer memu have it
transfer to (rather than boot) the Etch installer iso on a zip disk?
Some sort of swtich-root as opposed to chroot?

Any other ideas?  I would really like floppy booting to work since I can
make those on my 486.

Thanks,

Doug