Comment 1 for bug 252047

The 1024-cylinder restriction is very old; I understand that BIOSes since about 1997 have generally been supplied with the necessary extensions to avoid it as standard. How old is your BIOS? I'm reluctant to make the default behaviour of the Ubuntu installer be to create a /boot partition to work around this limit, since the PC partition table format is such that creating as few partitions as possible often makes life very much simpler, and this only affects systems that are now very old. Even a warning message would be extremely confusing noise for most people. Now, if somebody presented me with a way to detect such systems, that would be a different matter.

Could you supply the output of 'sudo dmidecode' on your system?

The secondary problem you had appears to be separate, and I suspect may in fact be due to using an external drive even though the 1024-cylinder limit problem probably isn't. Could you please attach the following files to this bug:

  /boot/grub/device.map
  /boot/grub/menu.lst
  /var/log/installer/syslog
  /var/log/installer/partman

You may need to use root privileges to read some of these files, particularly /var/log/installer/syslog.