USB floppy drive - not recognized when doing manual install of SLES9 on Poweredge 850

[Andy Butler]

I have a Dell Poweredge 850 which I'm trying to install SuSE Linux ES 9 on.  Due to the fact that we have a Areca SATA II RAID card on it (with our primary system hard drives connected to it), I have to manually load kernel module drivers for the card in order for SuSE to recognize my hard drives, because drivers for this card aren't in any of the mainstream kernels.

My problem is that since the Poweredge 850 does not have a floppy drive on it, I'm using a TEAC usb floppy drive, and I have the prebuilt kernel module on the floppy disk.  When I go to Manual Installation -> Load Kernel Modules -> IDE/SCSI -> More Modules, it tries to query for a floppy drive but of course finds none.  If I could alt-shift-F2 into a shell, I could mount it using "mount -t vfat /dev/sda /floppy", but alt-shift-F2 doesn't allow me to escape into the shell.  IT just gives me a blinking cursor in the top lefthand corner of the screen.

I've tried enabling "USB disk emulation=floppy" in the bios, but that does not seem to do the trick.  What have you all had to do in order to manually load kernel modules from a floppy disk on the Poweredge 850's?