In regards to booting from a floppy, you can actually fit everything you 
need onto a floppy (i.e. the booter, the system file, and the finder) and 
current kernels at least will boot off of it.  The floppy is 
automatically ejected when the boot reaches single user mode (which makes 
me wonder just how much of the .Sony driver hooks are still sitting in 
memory and how easy would it be to write a floppy driver?).  There is 
actually room on a single 1.4 Mb floppy for a System 7.1 system file, the 
Finder, and the 1.6 version of the Booter, so this is always an option if 
booting off of the internal hard drive causes trouble.

Later,

Colin Wood
ender@rice.edu