> This is my understanding on the matter: The bios doesn't know about CD's.
> The hack to boot from a CD is done by pretending that one file on the CD is a
> floppy (1.4M, or 2M). [...] One is stuck putting the kernel on the phony
> "floppy-on-cdrom" file.

 For the i386 platform, what is it that makes the CD "bootable"? I've made a
number of CD's now ("mkisofs -b"), and my Compaq boots off of them just fine.
My Tecra 8100 refuses to boot from them. No error messages, it just fails over
to booting from the HD. I changed the boot order in the BIOS, and tried the
interactive boot menu and neither made a difference.  Using the same settings,
I can boot from a Win98 or Win2K installation CD without problem. Any ideas?

>> ... I just made a boot floppy holding my CD's gzipped "root on cd0" kernel.

 My kernel is too big to fit on a single floppy anymore, so I'd like to figure
this out.