On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 5:32 AM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta@gmail.com> wrote:
[...] 
What piece of metadata defines a distribution..even an unnamed distribution?

If we talk about meta data, we talk about a change in GRUB. This won't be a working solution within the next months but it might be the correct solution for the future.
 
If i have 15 partitions, only the ntfs partition has a boot label, how
does the installer determine which of the other 4 partitions are the
/boot or / of a linux distribution?

??? You are not able to figure out what a root partition is and what a boot partition is? The only thing you need is the root partition, the rest will be in /etc/fstab. And to find out what a root partition is, is not really complicated, all distributions will have a common set of directories in /, if not, they are not detected, but for most of the distributions this will work.

Regards, Thomas