Warning! Grub core.img too big in Ubuntu 12.04

[mintybits]

I just came across this problem and it is potentially a huge deal for some users. The Grub code that fits in the 62 sector gap at the disk start will not always fit in the latest version that comes with Ubutnu 12.04. The installer does not warn the user!!! So you can get to the end of the install and Grub wont be installed and your system will be broken.

This may only affect people with 62 sector gaps who have linux partitions that use LVM or RAID. Not sure. Disks whose first partition starts at the newer position of sector 2048 are ok.

Be warned that installing 12.04 might break your system.

To reformat your disk to increase the gap is likely to require a full reinstall and is especially problematic for those with Windows dual-boots.
A work-around would be to boot off a different installation of linux/Grub on another disk or USB stick. I am having to boot off a USB stick now because my RAID10 system has 62 sector gaps on each disk and it would be a monumental task for me to reformat the disks.

This is having a serious impact on fedora users as fedora installs with LVM: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=737508

[srs5694]

On a single-boot computer, converting from MBR to GPT partitioning and adding a BIOS Boot Partition ought to do the trick; however, you'll need to have space for a sufficiently big BIOS Boot Partition somewhere on the disk. (In a worst-case scenario, you could probably steal 1 MiB from a swap partition or something.) You can do a lossless MBR-to-GPT conversion with my GPT fdisk (gdisk) software, which is available in Mint in a package called "gdisk", IIRC. Be aware that this will render the system unbootable until you re-install GRUB.

This won't work if you dual-boot with Windows, since Windows requires use of MBR partitions to boot using BIOS. If you were desperate, though, you could set up with a hybrid MBR. That would do the trick, but as described on that page, hybrid MBRs are risky, so I don't recommend this unless the alternatives are very unpleasant.

Dual-boots between Linux and FreeBSD should work fine with GPT, since FreeBSD can boot from GPT disks.

An entirely different solution is to switch from GRUB 2 to another boot loader, such as GRUB Legacy or even LILO. I'm not sure if these are available in the Mint repositories, though; or if they are, how well supported they are in terms of automatic updates of the boot loader when you upgrade your kernel.