completely stand-alone grub (legacy or new) boot floppy - how?

[John Lumby]

I want to make a grub boot floppy that is completely self-contained up to 
the capability to present a prompt and accept and run any grub command (e.g. 
setup).      I have tried diong this in the past using one of two methods 
but what I have found is that although the boot floppy works fine if the 
same disk is in hd0 as was there when I created the floppy, if that disks is 
not there and some other disk without the relevant stage files (stage 2 is 
it?) is there instead, all that happens when I boot the floppy is the single 
word
GRUB
appears on the console and then nothing.

I can't remember exactly how I set up the floppy (actually I have two and 
think I may have either
   run setup (fd0) from a grub prompt while running grub from booting the 
disk
   from running system:   run                 grub-install /dev/fd0
I know I have tried both of these methods but not sure on which floppies 
that I've tried
but I suspect that neither of these makes a completely self-contained boot 
floppy.

I am not asking for the final stage of finding a configfile on floppy - I 
just want a full grub subcommand environment without requiring to read 
anything from anywhere else.

Can someone please tell me how.- preferably both legacy and new grub2 if 
different.

John