Properly ran it with LILO as the boot loader. Shortly later the "boot from DOS" things started cropping up but I still preferred running them properly.
I remember having to boot my first distro from DOS because my sound card (a weird thing that was a combination of modem and sound card) didn't have Linux drivers. I would first load the DOS drivers, then boot Linux from DOS and it would then recognize it as a Sound Blaster.
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.
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).