make zdisk: Error 2

[Barry Masterson <jbarrm@panix.com>]

I'm recompiling the kernel. Went thru the setps as described in the
kernel-howto, the README in /usr/src/linux, also what is written in the book 
"Running Linux".

I chose zdisk, as I have had my share of problems with lilo. And booting
from a floppy is not all that much trouble. The compiling process
took 40 minutes, however it never completed. 'make dep' & 'make clean'
ran with out any problems. Listed below is the last few lines from the 
'make zdisk' output log:

make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-1.2.11/arch/i386/mm'
ld -qmagic -Ttext 0xfffe0 arch/i386/kernel/head.o init/main.o init/version.o \
	arch/i386/kernel/kernel.o arch/i386/mm/mm.o kernel/kernel.o mm/mm.o fs/fs.o net/net.o ipc/ipc.o \
	fs/filesystems.a \
	drivers/block/block.a drivers/char/char.a drivers/net/net.a \
	/usr/src/linux-1.2.11/lib/lib.a -o vmlinux
nm vmlinux | grep -v '\(compiled\)\|\(\.o$\)\|\( a \)' | sort > System.map
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-1.2.11/arch/i386/boot'
gcc -D__KERNEL__ -I/usr/src/linux-1.2.11/include -E -traditional -DSVGA_MODE=NORMAL_VGA  bootsect.S -o bootsect.s
as86 -0 -a -o bootsect.o bootsect.s
make[1]: as86: Command not found
make[1]: *** [bootsect.o] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-1.2.11/arch/i386/boot'
make: *** [zdisk] Error 2


>From what I can tell from the out put log, I'm missing 'as86'. Everything
else ran without incident, 'make dep', 'make clean', no problem. 

The kernel-howto, and 'Running Linux' don't clearly describe the full
zdisk procedure, other than to say "..put a floppy in drive A."

     * Should I mount the floppy drive before running 'make zdisk'?
     * Should the floppy disk be only low-level formatted, or formatted
       with the ext2 filesystem, or some other filesystem?

Any advice on completing the process will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Barry Masterson     -    386DX33, 40mhz 387, 8meg ram, 16meg swap.