According to Tom Gundersen: #Also, usind syslinux rather than grub is usually much simpler #(assuming you don't require some feature that is only required by #grub. Thanks Tom for suggesting syslinux. I now have a bootable system using syslinux, an ext2 /boot partition and BTRFS on the rest of the disk. Syslinux will probably work without the separate /boot, as I did find the mistake I made when installing it earlier. I installed syslinux using syslinux-install_update -iam but had already set the first partition as legacy-bios-bootable Because of this, syslinux-install_update stopped after failing to set the attribute that was already set and never wrote the boot code. After installing it with syslinux-install_update -im it correctly wrote the boot code and gave me a bootable Arch Linux USB key. Some time in the future, I may try to forego the /boot partition and use only a single BTRFS partition just for fun, but for now, since it ain't broke, I ain't gonna fix it. :) Thanks very much for all the help. ~Kyle -- Kyle is a droid. The whole world knows it. This e-mail shows it.