Comment 41 for bug 703009

guys, the main reason behind this problem is this f..cking Windows FlexNet licensing program which writes into an absolute sector of the first track of ur hard disk, in my case it was sector #48, other people report #32 or #10. Grub detects this FlexNet sector and then refuses to overwrite it with the grub boot loader, with the results u have seen and described above!

so this ain't no ubuntu bug, and also not really a grub bug, this is due to some program overwriting an area of the hard disk which normally is being reserved for boot loaders etc., and not for some f..cking licensing program..

pls see the following link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254

all ur problems above are easily solvable by following the chroot part of the comment #35 of this thread, and then erasing the FlexNet sector by the method proposed by the link above, with all the restrictions that are outlined there! So if u have an important program under Windows which uses this FlexNet licensing scheme, that program might not be working anymore, or the grub bootloader will be overwritten again some time in the future! Real monkey business!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!