Loading initrd from FAT partition fails silently?

[Bill Gribble]

I am using GRUB 0.5.96.1 from the Debian package.  I am trying to
install Linux on a machine that cannot be installed from its floppy
drive but can boot from the floppy.

I have a Linux kernel and a gzip-compressed root floppy disk image on
a Windows c: drive.  I am trying to boot that kernel with that root
filesystem image using an initial ramdisk.  

I have a GRUB boot floppy that gets me to a GRUB prompt.  When I type
'initrd /root.bin' after loading the kernel, no message is displayed.
Booting fails because the kernel cannot mount the ramdisk as a root
filesystem.

Until I read the GRUB source code I thought 'initrd /root.bin'
printing no message indicated success.  Now I know it means failure of
some kind, because there was no message printed of the form
  [Linux-initrd /root.bin ... ]

It would be really nice if GRUB could indicate (a) that it failed to
do something and (b) what the failure was.

I am seeking some input about what the failure might be.  If the
indicated file exists in the current GRUB root filesystem, and is a
compressed e2fs filesystem image, under what circumstances might GRUB
fail to load it as described above?  One hint might be that the root
image file is intended to be put on a floppy disk and was created by
'dd' so it's exactly the size of a 1.44M disk (1474560 bytes).  Will
the initrd load process fail if the size of compressed data is not
identical to the size of the file?

Thanks,
Bill Gribble