Help thread for newb installing arch

Do I even need GRUB?

you need a bootloader, you can check this page for other bootloaders: Boot loaders
i remember using syslinux for a bios system

Your problem is in the beginning of the disk, where MBR resides, I'm thinking your disk isn't properly aligned, so it confuses grub to think you have multiple partition tables/labels existing on disk, hence the error.

how are you setting up your disks? I would double check everything with parted, even better, wipe the disk clean with dd, mklabel msdos in parted and then do your partitions, make sure you have the correct mount points too, also it seems you installed grub, but didn't grub-mkconfig it.

the correct command to generate an fstab file is this:
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

You then chroot in, pacman -S the grub package and install it:

grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sdx (/dev/sda in your case)
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Also syslinux has an easy automatic installation, not sure how automatic that is, i have only used grub and efistub, but anyway you might want to look into it:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/syslinux

I'm looking into it

I didn't go to the Nuke from orbit option with zeroing my drives, but I did format it, so the data shouldn't be readable. Now I don't think that this would cause a problem, due to previouly metioned formating, but the disk was apart of a software raid array in windows, but I made the drive MS-DOS compatable, so I'm not worried, and I did do the correct genfstab command, that is something I'm sure of, and I don't think that I'm going to be using syslinux, but what am I lossing with syslinux instead of having grub installed, as I won't be using multiple OSs with this machine

Okay, so syslinux worked great, and the machine properly rebooted, however when I boot it puts me out to a shell which says sh: can't access tty; job control turned off but I still get a shell, so could some one explain the problem, and how to fix it