Compressed root FS & DoC partition

[Dzuy Nguyen <dzuy@infinity-studios.com>]

I have a 16MB DoC 2000.  I am able to boot make an ext2 FS on and boot 
via LILO.

Now, I want to be able to make it boot to a compressed root FS.  I've 
created my own
compressed root FS (about 6MB).  I figured I'd partition the DoC into 2 
parts of 8MB
each.  The first part is to hold the root FS (and possibly kernel) and 
the latter part an
ext2 FS to store system's configuration files (to mount on /etc later).

I've tried both using dformat and nftl_format to format half of the DoC 
and mke2fs it.
It just refuses to make the formatted half an ext2 unless the entire DoC 
is formatted.

Am I on the wrong path here?  Can someone point me to the right 
direction?  Thanks.

Dzuy