Is the BIOS Boot Partition required when GRUB is not installed to the MBR?

[Brandon Simmons]

I'm trying to figure out a rather esoteric problem: I recently
installed Debian squeeze on a Dell netbook with OSX installed. In the
Debian installation I specified that GRUB be installed to the Debian
partition, but (I believe) before that step the installer created a
bios_grub partition.

FWIW I'm currently booting into OSX using the Chameleon Bootloader.

Well I am trying to run a utility called 'gptsync' and it seems that
it aborts when it sees the "Unknown" grub_bios partition. So the short
story is I would like to know if it is safe to destroy this partition.

I have read the documentation here:

    http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition

But am not sure if it applies to an installation of GRUB directly to a
linux partition.



Thanks for any insights,
Brandon Simmons
http://coder.bsimmons.name/