[fmakunbound]

I hand totally forgotten about that. Wasn’t it called dosfs? It put metadata in files that would show up in DOS when you rebooted.

[LocalH]

loadlin was the tool that would boot the kernel (including initrd) from a running DOS system. You might be thinking of umsdos? IIRC, that's the tool that would allow you to actually run Linux from a FAT partition (likely FAT16).