Bootloaders not on hdd (no floppy)

Hi, i've been reading these forums for a bit now and i've decided it is time i ask. ive had linux up and running on desktops on and off for the past 6 years but all of them have had a floppy drive.
Unfortunatly my laptop doesn't. I am planning on doing a HD install of knoppix (or debian full) of the laptop but i do not want lilo (or other loader) on the MBR. does anyone know if it is possible to make a boot floppy out of a USB thumb drive? or a CD?
i have read a bit about isolinux/syslinux but this seems like a complicated way to do this.

If anyone has any tips please let me know.
(if its using iso/syslinux please, instructions hehe)

Hi,
why don't you install that lilo-thing onto your / or /boot partition, save the bootsector of this partition to file and give that to your preferred loader? This works great on several bootloaders/managers incl. m$'s ;-)
You just need an partition/media where you can transfer this file to the other OS for installing it.

Another idea is to boot your hdd-linux directly from cd, but this doesn't work with that Knoppix-CD - try an fedora/redhat cd instead (don't testet other distributions yet):
boot: vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2
this will boot the kernel from cd, but uses init from hdd. This mostly doesn't work with SCSI/RAID-Controllers because of missing initrd images :( . Also this will result in nonfunctional hardware (like sound, network etc.) because of the older kernelimage on the cd.

greetz, raid5