> > "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.
you may use 2.88MB floppy emulation.

put much-stripped down / filesystem in ramdisk and everything else in /usr
as iso9660 filesystem. do mount /usr at the beginning. more work could
reduce / filesystem size down to about 1MB i think (with links to /usr/bin
from /bin etc... leaving only init, sh, mount and modified /etc/rc with
first line "mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0a /usr"

i did similar thing with linux and have full-CD bootable linux, but i had
few thinks making it easier (like linux initrd)