Interface?

No.

The Linux ftape driver supports all kinds of tape drives connected to the floppy controller. If your drive is one of those, you may have a chance.

It is a floppy controlled drive. I can't install linux, unfortunately. Too time consuming (locating a copy, partitioning, etc). Anyone know if I could do this from a regular command line with the dos software or possibly a dos boot disk? If I need to do a dos or windows 95 boot disk, is it possible to make it boot off a compact flash card? Thanks!

You can always boot Linux off of a Live CD fully featured.

As for booting off of USB\flash, your BIOS has to support the option. If you go into your BIOS and do not see the option then you cannot do it.

Assuming your PC has no trouble recognizing the hardware then there should be no problem with booting of of a DOS boot disk. Only problem then is writing the data to somewhere else so you'll either have to:

1. Have a FAT16/FAT32 drive handy.
2. If no #1 then find a read/write NTFS driver.
3. Find some DOS CDR tools/drivers so you can burn to CD.
4. Load up a DOS USB drive and mount an USB\Flash\External hard drive.
5. Load a bootdisk with TCP/IP network support.

#5 sounds like the easiest.

or you could find an old PC and not mess around with your main computer.

I only have NTSF, thats why i thought a CF boot would be best (off a 160mb card) so that I would restore straight to the CF (and yes the bios supports. In fact, I cant stop the bios from wanting to boot off any memory card in my slots when inserted). I've been googling but I've only found a way to boot linux and winxp off a card. I have zero experience with linux, so I just wouldn't consider it.

I did a search in Google using "colorado/HP t1000" without brackets and a few pages with colorado/HP t1000 drivers for at least win95 came up.
I suggest that you do the same and see if you can find something suitable for your needs.