There are a number of stages where this process could fail, I will try to
explain what they are and what to check.
DOS booting is easy to recognise by the message that it prints MS-DOS
Starting ... on the screen. If this is not seen then the floopy disk is
either not-bootable or the PC is not bootable from the floppy disk drive.
When the AUTOEXEC.BAT file is run the commands in it should be echoed
to the screen by default. In this case there is just the single line in the
file that starts LOADLIN.
When LOADLIN executes it will do two very visible things, firstly it
will load the kernel into memory, secondly it will copy the ramdisk into memory.
Both of these are indicated by a Loading... message.
The kernel starts by uncompressing itself, this can give crc errors if
the kernel image is corrupted. Then it will start running the initialisation
sequence which is very verbose with diagnostic messages. Loading of the initial
ramdisk device is also visible during this phase.
When the /linuxrc file is run there is no diagnostic messages, but you
can add these yourself as an aid to debugging. If this stage fails to set up
the loopback device as the root device then you may see a message that there is
no root device and the kernel aborts.
The normal boot sequence of the new root device will now continue and this is
quite verbose. There may be problems about the root device being mounted
read-write, but the LOADLIN command line option 'ro' should
stop that. Other problems that can occur are that the boot sequence is confused
about where the root device is, this is probably due to a problem with
/etc/fstab.
When the boot sequence has completed, the remaining problem is that programs are
confused about whether the DOS partition is mounted or not. This is why it is a
good idea to use the fake mount command described earlier. This makes life a
lot easier if you want to access the files on the DOS device.