You can, besides writing grldr.mbr to the MBR or making a VBR invoking grldr (which is - I presume - what you mean by "installing") load it from BOTH NTLDR (which won't be used in a PE 2/3/4/5) and BOOTMGR (which is needed for a PE 2/3/4/5).
The "installation" (which is NOT at all an installation) consists in two steps:
- copy to the root of the device a grldr (and it's menu.lst)
- create in the root of the device a file named BOOT.INI with these contents:
[boot loader] Timeout=30 default=C:\grldr [operating systems] C:\grldr="grub4dos"Of course you are perfectly free to call the above procedure "installation" and to consider it "difficult" or "advanced", or "another level of complexity".
![:)](http://reboot.pro/public/style_emoticons/default/smile.png)
Same goes for "differential testing", no matter what you believe (and how much right you are in your beliefs) the differences between running a tool in a "full" OS vs. running it in a PE (as long as it actually works in the more limited PE environment) won't turn a turtle by magic in to a hare.
For the early classification between "slowish" and "fastish" we could use even VM's, like Qemu (to be able to test a "pure" IDE interface), or another one (to be able to test a simulated SCSI in VMWare or Virtualbox for a SATA one) with a "full" OS installed in it, since we are going to measure "relative" differences in speed, it will be as effective as that.
BTW, what I am telling you is that - at least in this preliminary phase - it makes NO sense whatsoever to attempt imaging anything bigger that (say) 2 times the size of the cache of the hard disk, and definitely attempting to image a 1.5 Tb disk would be foolish and unneeded.
![:duff:](http://reboot.pro/public/style_emoticons/default/duff.gif)
Wonko