Comment 6 for bug 445416

This setup has also worked for me for many years with both LILO and grub-legacy.

Does the filesystem (or even block device?) typically reserve the first "track" of any partition specifically for this purpose? That's certainly the way it works when installing grub to the MBR; it uses the space reserved before the first partition on the disk, which seems just as dicey in the presence of non-standard partitioning...