Comment 95 for bug 403408

I believe I've figured this out. The problem occurs when your computer doesn't recognize the total size of your hard drive. Look at the hard drive information in the BIOS settings. Whatever the computer recognizes is your limit. I replaced an 80 GB hard drive with a 180 GB hard drive. When I enter the BIOS, the computer reports that the size of my hard drive is 137 GB. This is most likely a limitation on the motherboard/hardware support settings and NOT a problem with GRUB 2. Your machine may not be booting properly because when you install Ubuntu, part of the system may be on hard drive space that is not accessible or recognized. The best thing would have been to research what the maximum size hard drive for your machine was and bought that size. BUT don't worry!

You can still use the one you bought even if it surpasses the maximum capacity limit. What you NEED to do is manually size the partitions on your hard drive during the installation process. It sounds hard but it's really not, and I know you'd like to use all of the space on your hard drive but you can't. Tough cookies.

When you get to the partition manager stage of your install make sure the combined amount of space between the root file system where Ubuntu will be installed, and the swap partition are less than or equal to the maximum size reported in the BIOS. Simply create a Primary partition for the file system and select " / " as the mount point on the drop down menu. Next, create a Logical swap partition that is double the size of your total RAM. That's it. Everything should install properly and reboot without issues.

So again, if your BIOS shows your hard drive to be 50 GB but it's really 80 GB and you have 1 GB of RAM you will have to do something like this: Primary partition = 49152 MB (48 GB), Swap partition = 2048MB (2 GB). Just to be safe, though, I would try to make my total go a little under the 50 GB limit. I've installed updates and rebooted several times with no issues. Sorry if I repeated anyone's answer. If you still have the same problem you probably have another issue. I'll check on this posting again within the next few days. Hope it helps.