booting to /boot only??

[cotfessi]

I have my first hard drive broken down in the following way:

/boot
/
/swap
/var
/home
/usr

I thought that I might try using the tar command to archive all of the partitions individually and then move those tarballs to a CD.

Is there a way to boot using a floppy or something so that I can wipe out those partitions and untar my backups? I figured that would be an easy way to undo problems that I create for myself but I know that lilo and other startup scripts are sitting in /etc.

Thanks for the input...

-cotfessi

[slapNUT]

mkbootdisk

You will need a few files on that disk if you plan on wiping /bin