Very manual install for lemote yeeloong

Hi,

I've got a lemote yeeloong. I'd really love to boot it from disk, but having
trouble doing it, and sysinst doesn't help me out here.

My understanding is that:
Firmware (PMON) has a bootloader, so none is needed.
Bootloader can read ext2 and FAT
Looks for a boot.cfg in the first? partition, if it can read it.
boot.cfg is a simple text file, example: 
  http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Projects/GNewSenseToMIPS#PMON2000_Boot_file_.28boot.cfg.29
Kernel can be on this partition and should be picked up by boot.cfg.

Once the kernel is loaded, hopefully it finds the right partition and doesn't
panic about missing root because I made partitioning even worse :-)

The problem: I can't for the life of me figure out how to make a partition that
the firmware can find. All my attempts so far have failed. Help?