Comment 7 for bug 995144

In the PC architecture (has nothing to do with DOS) the boot partition is the active partition. When Linux OS is installed, that partition is where the kernel loader should be located and that partition set active if the user choose (for extended partitions I offered a solution in my prior message).

Sectors in the first track has been reserved by IBM for data structures since the early 90's and the entire first track has been fully standardized and extended by the EMBR in 1996. See http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/specs/embr2.pdf and http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/history-bootit-bare-metal.htm. The first track has further been defined for EFI based systems and the GPT.

You should also note that the alignment to 2048 sectors has caused many users lost data and corruption by older OSes and their tools, this is, once again, because of the lack of knowledge and experience of those implementing it.

The fact remains that the current design of GRUB on PC's is destructive and improper. The design and flexibility of the PC architecture would allow a properly designed GRUB to work without causing any problems of conflicts.