I do not know if having or not having a partitioning table is a problem, there is some discussion about it at <a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5162/how-to-install-grub-to-a-whole-ext4-disk-without-partition-table">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5162/how-to-install-grub-to-a-whole-ext4-disk-without-partition-table</a> .