HOW TO: Installing Ubuntu on a machine with no CDROM drive
Today I had to install Ubuntu on one of the older machines in the computer room. It’s a 1U server 
without CDROM drive.
Ubuntu doesn’t seem to ship any floppy images. It does ship a utility to boot from IDE CDROM drives in the case where the BIOS is too old or full of bugs preventing it to boot from the CDROM. You can do that by creating a floppy that has drivers for the CDROM and allows booting from the CD. To be specific, the image shipped with the CD contains Smartbootfloppy which has a webpage (sort of) at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/
However, since this machine had no CD at all, this didn’t solve the problem.
My initial thought was to try using a CDROM drive connected to the USB port (at least the machine is new enough to have two USB ports). This however proved impossible due to the BIOS lacking functionality to recognize and boot from USB CDROM drives. And the boot manager from Ubuntu doesn’t recognize USB drives either. Dead end. Installing Ubuntu on a machine with no CDROM drive — efod.se