fdisk: begin earlier than start on new partitions

[Joanna Bryson <joannab dai ed ac uk>]

Another repost, but with substantially better understanding of the
problem:

My old disk is configured such that there is DOS on the first 1022
cylinders, then a little partition that gets mounted to /boot that
starts at cylinder 1023.  This is a standard trick for getting lilo /
linux to boot on large disks (apparently.)  The rest of root goes on
the next partition.

Unfortunately, I can't convince fdisk to allow my little partition
to be 2 meg big.  The second partition is created fine, but the third
partition always "begins" at 1024, although it "starts" where I tell
it to (like 1027.)   I've tried moving begin using the expert command,
to no avail.  The README.fdisk file (referenced in the linux man page
but not distributed with redhat as far as I can tell --- I got it from
www.fdisk.com) says that DOS often begins _after_ start, and that
expert command exists soley to replicate such weird partitions.  

The result is I'm trying to boot redhat off an old customized kernel
that happens to fit on one cylinder (the one distributed with 4.2
doesn't, of course.)  It's not working.  I got lilo to function (by
running it with the disks mounted in rescue mode) but then I get
(de)compression errors when it tries to read vmlinuz.  I've tried
changing the symbolic links in /boot to point at the 4.2 kernel on the
main root partition, but that doesn't work either and I've heard
there's good unix reasons why not.

The only suggestion I've heard is to buy a commercial disk
partitioner.  Has anyone got any other ideas?

Thanks,

Joanna