Floppy emulation

[Faux Pas III]

I have a laptop which lacks any kind of bootable removable media; 
the only thing it can boot from is the hard drive (or some mystical
external floppy that even the manufacturer doesn't think exists 
anymore).  I would like to be able to boot any arbitrary 1.44mib
floppy image which could be fetched off the filesystem.  However, 
just getting the boot sector wouldn't be enough; I'd need to get
the whole image into memory and catching floppy drive accesses, 
a'la eltorito for CDs... can grub be made to do what I want, and
if not, is there anything else that can that anyone's aware of ?

-- 
Josh Litherland (address@hidden)