From: Steve Litt via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
It's very much relevant today. If you don't want that UEFI mess, you need to format the boot disk with the old MSDOS partitioning scheme that Carey described almost exactly, so that you can boot to an MBR. Assuming your motherboard allows you to do that.
Not actually: the BIOS doesn't know or care about partitions. UEFI is another matter: it does know about partitions (GPT partitions). The motherboard, in BIOS / MBR mode, only boots the first 512 byte sector of the boot disk and jumps to it. That requires no knowledge of partitions. Everything after that depends on your boot loader and OS. Typically the MBR contains code to load more of the bootloader since 512 bytes is rarely enough. With the right boot loader, you should be able to use GPT on any old BIOS / MBR system. Fighting UEFI is a pretty lost cause. There may well be "smart" motherboards that sniff the disk to see if it should boot UEFI. Surely they would be looking for an ESP (EFI System Partition). Just make sure not to have one.