after much hacking i was able to figure out how to create a grub bootable cf card from scratch. (no windows or dolly needed for installation now!)
first you need a linux (or whatever) box with grub installed (just the software, the computer does not need to boot via grub) and the ablility to r/w cf cards.
erase your card and give it an ext2fs partition (you can start with one of the prebuilt images that are floating around, you just need to make space on the ext2 partition for the bootloader)
for now i will assume your cf card is on
/dev/sda and you mount it on /mnt/cf.
replace with your own settings everywhere they appear.
"mount /mnt/cf"
"mkdir /mnt/cf/boot"
"grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/cf /dev/sda"
now this will create a file /mnt/cf/boot/grub/device.map
edit this file and replace its contents with the single line
(hd0) /dev/sda
then rerun the command
"grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/cf /dev/sda"
it should print out just that line as the contents of the map file.
done! unmount /mnt/cf and boot your nice bootable cf card!
grub is really nice in this situation since it knows how to read ext2fs so it can boot pretty much any kernel on your card without having to rerun like lilo.
note that we never actually have to involve the ia-1 in this process! meaning you can write a script which will do EVERYTHING requried to create a fully bootable cf card.
copy a kernel and some apps to /mnt/cf/bin and /mnt/cf/boot and you have your own mini-distribution.
this process should work on any size cf card.
a similar process will probably work under *BSD.
