Booting mfslinux from a pre-partitioned HD

[Intensity]

@mmatuska I'm wondering what the most straightforward way is to build an mfslinux image then install it to a hard drive that's already pre-partitioned. This partition has sufficient space to hold the mfslinux image; it's just that a dd to the raw device would overwrite the existing partition table.

Would I use a chainloader, like grub, installed to the first sector(s) of /dev/sda with second stage install to some other partition (16MB /dev/sda1 for BIOSGRUB data, then a 128MB /dev/sda2 for the mfslinux image)? Would FreeBSD's chainloading system work here? What about Super Grub Disk?

Perhaps some of these options might require a slight change in the format of the built mfslinux image. My intent is to install to an available HD partition so that the system auto-boots into a mfslinux RAM disk without any user intervention necessary (perhaps upon boot, the options auto time out to boot into the mfslinux image existing on another partition).

Any ideas are appreciated.

[mmatuska]

Technically you need a correctly configured boot loader like GRUB (or even syslinux) and a place to store the vmlinuz and initramfs.igz files.