How to make a boot/root floppy?

[Krzys Majewski <majewski@cs.ubc.ca>]

I've been trying to roll my own boot/root floppy with syslinux. So far
I've  managed to put  a kernel  on one  floppy, a  root fs  on another
floppy, boot the kernel, mount the  root fs. The snag I've run into is
that the root floppy isn't  big enough for libc, /bin/sh, and whatever
stuff I'd like to have (networking). I've put busybox on it,
which is a very small implementation of basic unix programs (including
a budget  version of /bin/sh). But that's  all I can do,  and it's not
even enough to get a login shell.

Now,  I  can easily fit  on one  floppy  a  gzipped filesystem  image
containing libc, /bin/sh,  and busybox. But I don't  know how to mount
this image  as the root  fs! I've tried  the initrd= option,  but this
seems to  only work as  an "interim" root  fs used presumably  only to
hold kernel modules which may be needed to mount the *real* root fs. This is
not my case. I want the initrd file to *be* the real root fs. How can 
I accomplish this? If I can't  accomplish this, how can I mount a root
fs  from more  than one  floppy  (e.g. busybox  on floppy  #1, libc  &
/bin/sh on floppy #2)? 

cheers,
chris