You're reading the manual upgrade guide, for remote systems where you would otherwise cannot boot the ramdisk kernel to upgrade, which handles all of that for you.
If you have console access to the machine, serial or glass. Things are far easier.
I would move them to a separate page and not delete them. Sometimes you need to know something about dealing with the ugly. Nice work and your blog is great.
In the past problems could happen if your kernel ended beyond cylinder 1024 on the disk (i386 problem)
You should have a disklabel with partitioning for at least /, /usr, /usr/lib, /var, and /home (with / fully behind cylinder 1024 for i386 Bios to be able to load the kernel via int13h )
If you have console access to the machine, serial or glass. Things are far easier.