partition that has a initrd image and the initrd image knows how to mount the LVM and then the initrd turns control over to the startup scripts. You could have a boot loader sitting in the MBR that can point to an initrd that may exist in the LVM but I thought the whole idea of syslinux is to get away from the MBR model newer machines that have EFI don''t use an MBR anyways. EFI isn''t going to support LVM any time soon. EFI supports FAT. So does someone want syslinux/extlinux to be installed on a partition inside the LVM and have it boot from in there? Is that even possible wouldn''t the boot section interfere with the LVM? I''m guessing the new grub only supports LVM in the method I described above and has to be installed in the MBR. This also gets me curious about how syslinux and any boot loader sitting on a partition works. I am thinking that the boot loader sits at the head of the partition or there is a pointer at the head of the partition that tells where to load the bootloader into memory from? right? so the head of the partition gets modified when you install a bootloader. I don''t know if LVM would be happy with any such modification is why I am curious about this.