[Bug 1059827] Re: Non trival grub2 installs no longer fit in small embed areas

[Jean.c.h]

I tried installing both 12.04 and 12.10 using BTRFS for both / and /home
and Grub failed to install with each of them. Tried on both my Netbook
as well as my test rig(P4). When I dig a little deeper, it seems Grub
complains about core.img being "unusually large".....

An interesting observation I made today though.
On my test rig I have a number of installations of numerous distros. Havent fired this up in a couple of years mind you so I still had the Lucid development install as the latest on here....lol.
On the box I had a install of Fedora 13(which was the latest stable at the time IIRC) on BTRFS. Installed as both / and /home. Fedora 13 still had legacy Grub and I remember Lucid with Grub2 not being able to boot Fedora 13.
Well last night I replaced the Lucid install with 12.04 on Ext4(since BTRFS wounldn't work) and then today decided to check if Fedora would boot. Sure enough it boots! So I KNOW they can play nice.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1059827

Title:
  Non trival grub2 installs no longer fit in small embed areas

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Traditionally the first boot track of the disk was left unpartitioned.
  This area is used to embed the grub2 core.img file.  The size of this
  area used to typically be 62 sectors.  In recent years the typical
  size has changed to 2048 sectors to keep the partitions aligned to a 1
  MiB boundary for performance reasons on SSDs and newer hard disks with
  4KiB sector sizes.  All but the most trivial configurations of grub no
  longer fit in the old 62 sector size embed area.  This results in grub
  complaining that your embed area is unusually small.

  Upstream appears to have no desire to support such configurations, so
  this is unlikely to be fixed, but I will leave this bug report open
  for now.  The workaround for the problem is to repartition the disk
  with modern partitioning tools that will align partitions to 1MiB,
  thus leaving 2048 sectors for the embed area.

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