Thanks for all the replies! With your help, I've killed two birds with
one stone.
First, the command mkboot automagically sets lilo up on a floppy such
that when I boot off the disk, it loads my linux installation without
any additional commands. This appears to be the bootdisk that the
Debian installation would have made for me. Judging from the commands
that went by during the process, it appears to do automatically what you
outlined for me, Ted.
Also, I'm investigating grub via that helpful article. I'm going to
print it out and fiddle around with grub some more as time permits. In
the interim, I've got my boot floppy, so I feel a little more secure.
I'm currently dual booting the system off my hard drive using lilo, yet
the little aside over at linux journal seems to indicate that grub is a
good loader to use as well.
Anybody care to comment on the usefulness of my switching over from Lilo
to Grub for my booting tasks?
Thanks again for the help; this was exactly what I was looking for!