My preference is to use only the bootloader for the OS I'm booting, as opposed to a "boot manager" that presents a menu of OS's. I avoid using chaining techniques the way something like GRUB does. And I don't use MBR's if I don't have to. Disklabels alone will suffice. So the stick contains only an OS-specific bootloader and the OS, usually just a kernel with embedded ramdisk or a loadable kernel module containing a filesystem and userland. I keep it very simple.

This works well for me with PC's. Would this work with today's x86 Macs?