ok. wew. searched, read, reboots (did this in a loop for 10x's).
i've gotten p5 images built and have been able to recognize and write to the DoC (many thanx to a kernel oops w/ devbios project and it's apperant incompatability with apm).
After erasing the DoC, I'm realizing that I need an ipl image burned prior to burning linuxbios.image & linuxkernel.image images to the rom.
Ipl is needed to boot linuxbios. Linuxbios is needed to boot linuxkernel. (And so on...)
I see that the ipl.asm is provided only by m-sys on a NDA.
(btw, using an Intel 440bx chipset here).