This is much more complicated than necessary ... the problem is, making a bootable (!!) FAT partition using only free linux tools. This procedure did work for me
disk="$1"
parted -s ${disk} mklabel msdos
sleep 1
sfdisk -D -uM ${disk} <<EOF
,32,06,*
,,0c,
EOF
sleep 1
mkdosfs ${disk}1
mkdosfs ${disk}2
dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin conv=notrunc of=${disk} bs=440 count=1
syslinux ${disk}1
mcopy -i ${disk}1 vmlinuz initrd.img syslinux.cfg ::
The problems are
mformat can create bootable partitions but hangs for no reasonsfdisk fails on a disk without a partition tablesyslinux didn't work with FAT32parted did not create properly aligned partitions for DOSparted cannot automatically derive the size of a partition to create from the available spacemakebootfat did not accept the ldlinux.bss file from the syslinux source distribution