I decided to upgrade my work laptop dual-boot (with XP) machine from 12.04 to Saucy just to have a look. What else is there to do when compiling two hours worth of stuff (on another machine, obviously)?
The installer failed at the grub install. Hmm. To be expected I suppose since it still is beta. But, like an idiot <insert forehead smack here> I realized this is a dual boot machine, thus grub is required AND I had just wiped my grub files out with the reformat of the old install partition. Icing for the cake: I'm at work without all the resources I have a home i.e. older version of Kubuntu and such. Sigh...
...well at least I still had more than an hour and a half to resolve this. So here's the content of the errors (might be slightly off - memory being what it is and all):
So it appears I had two issues: Whatever the heck Flexnet is sitting in my boot area and my "embedding" area is too small! That last one kinda hurt my feelings - but that's a different thread. 
It seemed that the Flexnet thingy is just a warning, but I didn't like the sound of it. A google or two later and it turns out Flexnet is an "Automated and Optimized License Management for Adobe Products." It seems Adobe has decided your boot sector is just the place to store DRM for their products. Kinda like a professional version of a virus or rootkit - nice. Since I didn't have any Adobe products on my XP install required by my work, it was going to go. IMO, Adobe is up there with Oracle, Symantic, Norton, and a few others as propagators of problem laden bloated software that I just cannot STAND!
It's OK - I'm calm now.
The more serious issue was the apparent lack of space for grub. Seemed very odd as grub (I believe v1.99) had already been working on this machine. Since Flexnet was occupying sector 32 (in part where grub wants to put it's core image) it seems that removing that little bugger would be the beginning and end of this issue - and would have been.
But as I researched, I read that another contributor to the problem was a common issue among XP formatted hard drives. The first partitions were commonly started at sector 63 - the very first available sector after boot space, leaving just exactly enough room for grub. One could surmise that using that absolute minimum space for anything installed isn't a good idea. What if the grub developers add a bit to the core image? I've also read that using LVM and/or RAID will increase your core.img file size as well.
Common practice of late is to begin your first partition at a MB boundary: sector 2048, so I decided to make that happen. Luckily, the live version of Kubuntu "Saucy" has the needed tools to do this. Also lucky for me, the first partition of this Dell laptop is the Dell recovery and was a mostly empty fat32 partition. KDEpartitionmanager, a "shrink and move right" later and I had the partitioning where I wanted it.
Now on to the Adobe Exorcisim!
Again: not too difficult. Using dd I backed up my partition table, wiped the entire MBR area, put the partition table back, ran grub-install: done. No errors or warnings and still and hour left. Enough time for lunch!
For those interested, here's the dd commands that do the above:
Backup MBR and partition table: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/mbr.img bs=512 count=1
Wipeout the previous MBR and following 62 sectors: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=63
Restore just partition table: sudo dd if=/tmp/mbr.img of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=64 skip=446
I documented elsewhere in the forum how to do the above, but I repeated the commands for quicker retrieval.
**NOTE ABOUT USING DD** dd can and will (if improperly used) destroy your data. Use with care!
The installer failed at the grub install. Hmm. To be expected I suppose since it still is beta. But, like an idiot <insert forehead smack here> I realized this is a dual boot machine, thus grub is required AND I had just wiped my grub files out with the reformat of the old install partition. Icing for the cake: I'm at work without all the resources I have a home i.e. older version of Kubuntu and such. Sigh...
...well at least I still had more than an hour and a half to resolve this. So here's the content of the errors (might be slightly off - memory being what it is and all):
Code:
/usr/sbin/grub2-setup: warn: Sector 32 is already in use by FlexNet; avoiding it. This software may cause boot or other problems in future. Please ask its authors not to store data in the boot track. /sbin/grub2-setup: warn: Your embedding area is unusually small. core.img won't fit in it.. /sbin/grub2-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged.. /sbin/grub2-setup: error: will not proceed with blocklists.
It seemed that the Flexnet thingy is just a warning, but I didn't like the sound of it. A google or two later and it turns out Flexnet is an "Automated and Optimized License Management for Adobe Products." It seems Adobe has decided your boot sector is just the place to store DRM for their products. Kinda like a professional version of a virus or rootkit - nice. Since I didn't have any Adobe products on my XP install required by my work, it was going to go. IMO, Adobe is up there with Oracle, Symantic, Norton, and a few others as propagators of problem laden bloated software that I just cannot STAND!
It's OK - I'm calm now.
The more serious issue was the apparent lack of space for grub. Seemed very odd as grub (I believe v1.99) had already been working on this machine. Since Flexnet was occupying sector 32 (in part where grub wants to put it's core image) it seems that removing that little bugger would be the beginning and end of this issue - and would have been.
But as I researched, I read that another contributor to the problem was a common issue among XP formatted hard drives. The first partitions were commonly started at sector 63 - the very first available sector after boot space, leaving just exactly enough room for grub. One could surmise that using that absolute minimum space for anything installed isn't a good idea. What if the grub developers add a bit to the core image? I've also read that using LVM and/or RAID will increase your core.img file size as well.
Common practice of late is to begin your first partition at a MB boundary: sector 2048, so I decided to make that happen. Luckily, the live version of Kubuntu "Saucy" has the needed tools to do this. Also lucky for me, the first partition of this Dell laptop is the Dell recovery and was a mostly empty fat32 partition. KDEpartitionmanager, a "shrink and move right" later and I had the partitioning where I wanted it.
Now on to the Adobe Exorcisim!
Again: not too difficult. Using dd I backed up my partition table, wiped the entire MBR area, put the partition table back, ran grub-install: done. No errors or warnings and still and hour left. Enough time for lunch!
For those interested, here's the dd commands that do the above:
Backup MBR and partition table: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/mbr.img bs=512 count=1
Wipeout the previous MBR and following 62 sectors: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=63
Restore just partition table: sudo dd if=/tmp/mbr.img of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=64 skip=446
I documented elsewhere in the forum how to do the above, but I repeated the commands for quicker retrieval.
**NOTE ABOUT USING DD** dd can and will (if improperly used) destroy your data. Use with care!
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