Henrik Carlqvist - 2025-05-20

They will probably both be able to boot a system, but they contain slightly different data as they come from different sources. Those different data will probably only be notable by an end user as slightly different error messages if something goes wrong. The switch -7 writes an MBR which looks as the one from Microsoft Windows 7. It is also possible to write an MBR looking as it came from syslinux with the switch -s, however even that one might differ slightly depending on version of syslinux.

The MBR is the first step to boot, then you will also need a working boot record in the active bootable partition and that boot record might need some file on the filesystem.