[syslinux] Any way to boot a CD if no BIOS support & CD-ROM is not 100% standard?

[Nazo]

(Back on the subject of trying to figure out some round-about manner
to boot a CD on a system old enough to not support booting CDs via
BIOS.  There's no one topic to reply directly to, and I'm too lazy to
go back and manually copy everything, then add the quote symbols, so,
sorry, no quote of previous text on this one.)

Ok, sorry it's been so long for me to get around to this.  I finally
got around to attempting Grub.  I dug through the manual, created a
boot floppy with Grub, and booted it up in the laptop.  Then I typed
"root (cd)" and it failed with the error "Error 23: Error while
parsing number"  Without that working, I just don't see much solution
beyond just manual booting of things, only, I'm not sure what I'm
going to find that actually fits on a single 1.38MiB (1.44MB) floppy. 
Anyone have any idea how complicated it is to create one of those
setups where it gets half of the data from one floppy, then changes to
another for the rest?  I think I saw that once from some rescue disk
type thing back when bootable CD rescue discs were less popular (has
been quite a long time.)  Probably too complicated for me to do anyway
to be honest.

Maybe someone who knows more about grub might see something I'm
missing?  Or is there just no way?  Too bad this old laptop can't boot
a PCMCIA ATA drive (Compact Flash card,) but, that seems to be even
more complicated to do than an IDE CD-ROM I think.

BTW, one person sent me a seperate e-mail suggesting I try the tool
Gujin.  Well, it's hard to figure out exactly how to get the thing
working, but, it seemed to be, and it didn't give me any option to
boot the CD I had in the drive when I tried it.  It does look like a
potential sucessor to Smart Boot Manager though.