The following story illustrates how you may end up needing a floppy, even if
you think you won't need one in the first place.

I decided to run my machine until the battery gave out if for no other reason
than to see how long it would last. In order to prevent damage to the
filesystems, I did a: smartdrv c- And then loaded dblspace and told it to
unmount my compressed drive which contains, among other things, my \UTILS and
\DOS directories. What I didn't know was that dblspace saves the fact that I
unmounted the disk to dblspace.ini on drive C:. This file is read-only, hidden,
system. This means that without changing attributes, I can't remove or change
it. I can't change attributes (or run dblspace) because the .ini file is
telling dblspace.bin not to auto-mount drive D:. I can't mount D: manually,
because it contains my DBLSPACE.EXE. (Yes, I feel like a fool.) I even tried
using Compaq's configuration utilities to overwrite dblspace.ini, but compaq
was nice enough to make it so it won't overwrite read-only files. I can't
figure out a way to force setup to let me go to a dos prompt, and I can't find
a way to force dblspace.bin to mount drive D:. It seems I need a floppy drive
to boot from so I can run a copy of dblspace.exe, remount my D: drive, and
(this time) copy the most important of my system files over to my uncompressed
drive. Would anyone be willing to let me use a floppy drive for a few minutes,
or is this something an authorized compaq service center would have?