Grub reports conflict in sector usage.

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I have just now removed some old kernels. I did an update-grub, but
  grub-install /dev/sda
is reporting an odd error that I've never seen before:

root@roisin:~# grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: Sector 50 is already in use by the program `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.

I do not know what FlexNet is. Synaptic does not either. This machine has stock Windows 7 and Xubuntu partitions only, and that's all it ever had (well, earlier Windows and Kubuntu, but a long time ago).

At the very least, I'd like grub to report more information that might help me figure out what's going on. Or is there some malware that it just discovered. As it stands, I can't tell and don't know how to investigate.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: grub-pc 2.02~beta2-29ubuntu0.3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-34.39-generic 4.2.8-ckt4
Uname: Linux 4.2.0-34-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Mon Mar 21 09:50:00 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-01-16 (430 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 14.04.1 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140723)
SourcePackage: grub2
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to wily on 2015-11-02 (140 days ago)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Copying my response to ubuntu-users:

One of the peculiarities of this stuff (FlexNet and others) is that uninstalling the proprietary software in question doesn't necessarily actually remove all its remnants from the machine; from what we can tell, this appears to be deliberate, in order to enforce things like trial periods even across uninstall/install cycles.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/windows-applications-making-grub2-unbootable.html may be of some help in understanding the background; that was part of my attempt to gather information in order to put in place what eventually
turned into the warning message you're seeing.

Note that this is *not* an error message; it is a warning. An error would mean that there is some problem that couldn't be fixed
automatically. But in this case, it's only a warning: GRUB is telling you that it worked around a problem. You can ignore this message if you like.

The reason GRUB reports this message, even though inevitably not everyone will understand it or be able to do much with it (remember it's only written to the terminal, so it's not very intrusive) is that we have no other way to encourage people to complain to the vendors of the proprietary software in question that abuses bits of the boot area. Their misbehaviour can have much more serious consequences if there is already a boot loader in place there when the proprietary software tries to write its licence tracking stuff there; GRUB actually has to implement error correction in assembly on its own boot code in order to
stop this rendering systems unbootable, which is a non-trivial maintenance cost! We therefore need some kind of way to exert pressure on these vendors, even if it's small and indirect.

We can't really give much more information in the warning message, because that would involve us putting in a lot of time researching the quirks of proprietary software rather than developing free software. The current situation seems like a reasonable compromise, because at least we don't silently brush the problem under the carpet.

I hope that this message will turn up for future people searching for this problem.