Well ... good news ... I got it to work. It seems the partition where I put the CD image was ext3, and the boot floppy or its hard disk image in "hardrive_boot" doesn't deal with ext3 filesystems. When I reformatted it as ext2, everything worked like in the books.

Speaking of ext3 ... I just did a "knx-hdinstall" of *Quantian* (a Knoppix remaster) and it offered me the chance to install to an ext3 partition. The choices are ext2, ext3 and reiserfs. So ... I picked ext3 and it went a little bit, then croaked, complaining that the kernel didn't support ext3. It's not essential that I have ext3, but I've never messed with any of the other journaling filesystems. It seemed like a good idea at the time ...