Note: I am talking about bootfrom - which is supposed to be a way to boot from NTFS (or ReiserFS) - *not* FROMHD, which only works with FAT/FAT32 (or ext2?) Note that FROMHD works fine "out of the box", but the point is it only works with the 'classic" HD filesystems.

Anyway, my question is: What is the intended use of BOOTFROM?

To go ahead and try to answer my own question, let me say that I am intrigued by it but I was not able to get it to work. Here's my experience.
On a new-from-the-factory XP machine, I booted XP and copied the 8/16/04 KNOPPIX....iso file to C:\

Then, I rebooted and booted a customized Knoppix CD (of the same version) that contains the boot stuff, but not the "big file" (the cloop file). I got to the boot prompt and entered: knoppix 2 bootfrom=/dev/hda1/K*.iso
It didn't work - it gave me the "screen of death" - cannot find Knoppix file system - dropping you to a very limited shell.

Now, the reason I am trying to do this at all is because of defective hardware. The CD drives on some older machines cannot boot the regular Knoppix CD because they can't reliably access all the tracks on the CD. I've found that I can boot the "boot only" version on these machines. So, can I use BOOTFROM in any way to get around these hardware limitations?