Comment 5 for bug 995144

If there is no partition starting at lba 63 (the normal location when sectors per track is 63 for modern large hard drives) grub can use over 100 sectors (0-100) and maybe more. The only "safe" area is within the first track, however that isn't really safe as other specs such as gpt, embr, certain attribute fields for Windows and some ibm structures already use that area. A kernel loader really belongs in a boot partition by default, at least on PC architecture.