You also can let a friend burn the drivers to a CD
BTW, in bios, is "report no fdd to win95" enabled ?
But I also think it's a hardware issue, because of the error on startup you reported.
Have you checked that the floppy drive is connected to the connection beyond the cable twist ?
Between the connection mainboard - floppy there has to be a cable twist, otherwise A: can't be recognized.
RJ