Just stick with MSDOS, and use a real distro for it I suggest. If you really wanted to be snazzy you could use a BSD disklabel.
And if you boot off the livecd you could probably get it to work with something (kinda) like this...
$ cp -R / /mnt (mnt being mounted to the harddisk, with all other partitions (if any) mounted in there).
$ chroot /mnt
$ grub-install
or
$ lilo
depending on whatever you have, you might have to change certain options and stuff for grub/lilo or actually get grub/lilo, read the docs for them and you should be right.