Unless your computer is pretty old, it probably uses UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) to boot. The idea is that a bootloader picks up files from an EFI partition and uses them to start ...
My UEFI experience so far has been limited to only two laptop OEMs, HP/Compaq and Acer. I found the former to be relatively difficult to work with (see the recent Compaq and earlier HP Pavilion posts) ...