Creating a boot filesystem with the default settings for mke2fs will
render grub useless because grub can't read partitions created with it.
The issue is that the inode size is 256 by default, which is compatible
with kernel 2.6.10 and higher. Older kernels, and also grub won't work
with anything else than 128, which is the default according to the
manpage (but clearly isn't).
We should fix this before making our new installer CD and we should nag
upstream about this. During my search for a solution, I found not a
single solution, but several forum posts coming from several
distributions, all without solution other than "install lilo, grub is
broken on my distro".