OK, enough screwing around.
My proposal:
Split the project into 2 working areas... BIOS Boot loader
The boot loader team can start coding NOW. First we make a stage1 loader that fits in the MBR that jumps to our real-mode proggie loaded somewhere on disk. When this program get's put in flash the stage1 is just abandoneed and it is jumped to directly.
The very attractive side result is we end up with a seperate system usable by people that do not or can not use our (right now non existant) BIOS.
The BIOS team can sort the rest of this shit out later. Even if part/most/whatever of the boot code needs to be redone, what will remain are all the real mode utils (IE chain type loaders) left over from the boot system.
IMO we should just start hacking at GRUB. For instance being able to run a real mode util them fall back should be put in. OS/2 and NT will not boot directly for me. Fix this. Fix other OS's. When (if) the time comes we start over taking chunks of our optimized code out of what we did in GRUB.