[syslinux] Installing SYSLINUX in PBR, not MBR?

[Josh Lehan]

Hi.  Are there any gotchas to installing SYSLINUX in the PBR of a 
partition, and not the MBR of the overall hard drive?

The reason I want to do this, is to take my "PXE-on-a-disk" project, and 
install it simply into one very small (1MB or so) FAT16 partition.

ftp://ftp.scyld.com/private/jlehan/pxe-on-a-disk.html

This partition would be placed near the very beginning of the drive.

The goal is to have a way of choosing to boot PXE or the fully-installed 
operating system, on a "lights-out" installation, without having to 
physically intervene and change the computer's BIOS settings.  This 
particular PC can't be remotely administered, unfortunately.

I'm hoping to accomplish this by setting the active flag of the 
partition table, to the partition I want.

The idea is this:

If I set the active flag of the fully-installed operating system's 
partition, then the system boots into that fully-installed operating system.

If I set the active flag of the "PXE-on-a-disk" partition, though, the 
system boots into PXE.

Does this idea sound reasonable?  When other people have needed to solve 
this problem before, what approach did they take?

Josh