Quoting an anynimous coward, from the post of Tue, 27 Jun:
> 
> (private, not to put myself an idiot in front of the whole world if it's a 
> stupid question ;) )

there are no stupid questions, there are only stupid people.

> Isn't the system looking at the MBR for booting rather than the first 
> partition? I mean, don't you need to install the bootloader on the device 
> itself, rather than the first partition?

well, I'm answering on the list since maybe a few others don't know it
yet...

there are pros to chaining bootloaders. you may sometimes want the MBR
to direct you to one of several boot options directly, and maybe one or
two chained ones for other bootloaders to do their thing. sometimes you
have no other choice since MS (for instance) only supports booting from
its main (system) partition and only on a primary partition. If you have
a multiboot system and a reinstall of windows kills your MBR - you can't
boot your linux anymore without first booting a rescue disk and using IT
to recreate the boot sector. If you use grub or LILO on the partition
instead of the MBR, you get the best of both worlds - linux and windows
not fighting over the MBR, and booting back to Linux means just changing
the "active" partition flag and let the standard MBR do its thing.

One more reason I put lilo on the beginning of /dev/md0 when it's a
RAID1 of sda1 and sdb1, is that if the system needs to boot with only
one disk, it works smoother. I actually haven't tested this with Grub,
but that's a matter for a whole different discussion.

back to the subject - syslinux should, in theory, work just fine from
the MBR, I just followed all the howtos when my other attempts failed,
and all the howtos for both Linux and Windows direct you to install it
on the partition. I have no idea if this has any significance though,
it's possible it'll fail just as miserabley either way.

-- 
Freedom fighter
Ira Abramov
http://ira.abramov.org/email/

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