Installing Grub on HD from bootable floppy

I have an old machine (with floppy and hard drive but no CD support=

) and=20
I'd like to put Linux onto the hard drive. I've created a bootable floppy=
=20
(that uses Grub) containing a kernel and an initrd and that comes up Okay=
=2E=20
(Linux 2.4.22 on an 8Mb machine. Hah!)
      But now I'm stuck (I think) at a "chicken or the egg" problem tryin=
g to=20
move this onto the hard drive.
      I *think* I need to use fdisk to partition the disk so I'll have an=
 ext2=20
chunk for the eventual root FS and a second partition for swap. Then I'll=
 do=20
an "mke2fs" and "mkswap" on the respective partitions. (Disk partition=20
information is in the last few bytes of the boot block if I'm not mistake=
n.)
     But when I "dd if=3Dstage1 of=3D/dev/hda count=3D1" (and also "stage=
2"=20
thereafter), isn't this going to overwrite the partition information?
     And if I "dd" first and then "fdisk" second, when I boot from the ha=
rd=20
drive, Grub complains "Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x83". (I'=
m=20
building grub from source and *think* I had the "--enable-ext2fs" flag.)
     Any ideas / shortcuts? (Can't use syslinux as it doesn't understand =
this=20
machines A20 requirements. I haven't tried LILO...)

     Thanks for any suggestions and/or pointers,
          Fried Brain.

--=20
Ed Skinner, ed@flat5.net, http://www.flat5.net/