Stephen Powell wrote:
You might try switching to lilo as your boot loader and see if that solves your problem. I use lilo as my boot loader and have for a long time. I may be able to assist you if you have difficulty.
For the record, grub can also load a kernel and an initrd by just providing a block list, as you described for lilo. Since the filesystem is made read-only, this shouldn't be too ugly and certainly worth trying.
-thib