Comment 73 for bug 1065281

We got some additional help from Stuart Hayes at Dell. After some analysis and testing, he got the 4k drive to boot by creating a larger fat32 partition than what we're creating right now:

The version of Ubuntu that you gave me (13.10) was creating a FAT32 filesystem (on the EFI system partition) that was only 100MB, but a FAT32 filesystem on a 4K drive has to be at least 133MB or so--see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Size_limits (and adjust for the fact that they are assuming sectors are 512 bytes).

On my hard drive, I manually created a new FAT32 partition that was about 1GB, did "mkfs.vfat /dev/sda3" on it, and then mounted it and copied everything from the 100MB FAT partition onto my new 1GB FAT partition. When I rebooted, UEFI firmware did recognize my new partition as a valid FAT32 partition and would let me boot to it.

So the Ubuntu installer should just need to make sure the boot partition meets the requirements of the FAT32 filesystem (i.e., at least 133MB or so).

Stuart