I have access to several machines so my preference would be to remove the drive and test it on another machine. Alternatively, I keep a spare floppy drive - they are only about $20 here - and I would put the new one in an empty bay and switch the cables from the existing one to the new one.
I don't like to mess around without knowing for sure that I can boot to dos in an emergency.
That said, two possible solutions. One would be to change the value of bootgui to 0 in c
msdos.sys Details may be found at
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article07-021 Without a working floppy drive to boot from in case of problems this would worry me. (Can you boot from another drive in an emergency?)
The other possible solution is to use a patch at
http://www.geocities.com/mfd4life_2000/ I have never tried it and don't know how safe it is. (However, the link was given in a thread at annoyances.org and nobody posted a warning afterwards.)