On Mon, 24 May 2010, Stephen Powell wrote:
To the best of my knowledge, it is the *only* bootloader which supports setting an initial text video mode *and* does not use any sectors outside the master boot record and outside of a partition. If I'm wrong about that, someone please correct me.
grub2 supports loading its core.img from a dedicated partition instead of embedding it in the first "cylinder". This does require switching to the GPT partitioning scheme which may or may not be acceptable to you. -- Edward Allcutt