emergency boot disk

To whom it may concern:

This question concerns creating an emergency boot disk for Caldera Open
Linux 1.3, which I am using to learn Linux since I have two books of the

"do this, now do that" variety for this distribution.

I would appreciate any reply in language that a newbie can understand.

My configuration: 2 HDs, approx 2MB each, with Caldera 1.3 on hdb
                                           (hda contains Red Hat 6.1)
                  main OS: Win98, running Partition Magic

The Caldera 1.3 installation CD allows the choice of writing LILO either

to the MBR, a floppy, or the beginning of the Linux root partition.

In an earlier installation, I had put LILO on a floppy (which booted
OK),
but normally booted using Loadlin from DOS 6.22. This time, since I am
happily using Partition Magic, I put LILO in the root partition, but
would
still like if possible to have an emergency boot disk available.

Several sources suggest that the command

dd if=/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0

would do the trick (my file vmlinuz is in /), but when I try to boot
with
the disk created by this command, either with or without an extra

bs=8192

at the end of the command, and either with or without first running
kfloppy to format the disk

(Extra Question - when is this necessary?),

at the section

>>> kernel: mounting root filesystem <<<

the following messages appear, some recurring several times and with
what
I assume are various memory locations indicated:

attempt to access beyond end of device
unable to read superblock
FAT bread failed
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:03

Is there an obvious way to fix this, other than twice reinstalling Linux

(first with LILO on floppy, then on the root partition)?


Sincerely,
Ronald Jacobowitz
Phoenix
jacobo@math.la.asu.edu