Bios upgrades etc on XP machine

Hi people,

Can anyone tell me how I might run bios upgrade utilities (and the like) on
a Win XP Pro laptop with no floppy disk?

AFAICS, these utilities won't run in the GUI so the machine has to be booted
in DOS. I think you can create DOS-like boot disks from XP - and I have Win
98 boot disks to use anyway - but I have no on-board floppy drive. I DO have
a USB floppy but this requires drivers to be loaded before the machine can
see it. So I can't see how it can be used as a boot drive. I've also got a
memory stick device but this suffers from the same problem.

Is there a way round this? I'd be very grateful for your help.

Paul - Coventry UK