that suggestion of using boot partition is good only if all other installations use grub for booting..my primary linux is fedoracore4 and its having the mbr.
i cannot have any other format than ext2 or 3 then only it can chainload the newly installed partition.
thats why i have put grub /lilo to its own root partition.for other 8 installs of linux.
as mbr dies for some reason then all of them will be dead.
with boot loader in root partition recovery or boot is easy just point to the partition to boot.