not really a bug

[Lance]

Hello,
If someone has the time and patience with a relative newcomer to GRUB. I 
was recommended GRUB through irc.debian as I have some problems with my 
booting procedure, and someone said it was highly preferable to LOADLIN, 
so I downloaded and have been through the GRUB-DOC quite a few times 
without being able to come to a rational GO/NO GO decision.
A smidgin of history will explain things I hope.

Started with a Knoppix trial CD version, as I had left Linux at about 
Suse V6, being unable to get a decent working configuration for my TEAC 
Toaster piloted by a Tekram SCSI Card.
The Knoppix looked better, and there was a hard disk install available.
Still no support for the Tekram SCSI card and hence, no toasting :(
I was advised to recompile to include the correct modules, ( plus some 
newer ones for my USB Dial-Up modem ).
Unfortunately, the Knoppix HD install doesn't include the sources, so 
off to kernel-source.org for the latest stable 2.4.20, recompile then..
Message = vmlinuz too big for a boot-floppy.
Now I have the following setup, from which you'll see why I do not 
particularly use LILO and mess with the MBR.
HD1 IDE partition 1 W_98SE
        partition 2     programs
        partition 3     data
HD2 IDE	partition 1	MS-DOS ( mainly MP3 downloads, and HD1 backup 				 
images via Norton Ghost )
        partition 2     (way down the back of a 60Go dirve ) Knoppix            
                        root.
        partition 3     Linux /swap
The BZImage created by the new compilation weighs 1.1Mo, so should go on 
a floppy, but I've been at it for a week now with no success. The drive 
whirrs a few times when I try to write the boot-floppy with a simple 
shell dd command, ( or other procedures ) but when I try to boot with it 
I get 'Ran out of data - system halted' message.
As I said, LOADLIN could be an alternative proposition for choosing 
whether to boot W_98 or Knoppix, but maybe you can convince me that GRUB 
would be more efficient & elegant.
I don't fancy messing with windows/system and batch files if I can avoid 
it, and that looks imperative under LOADLIN.

My root partiton is hdc2
My W_98 partition is hda1

Thanking you in advance.
( I really do need my hand held through this )

Lance.