Comment 22 for bug 945433

Actually it is the reverse Ahmad. 10.04 disabled the HPA, making use of the full disk. Thus, parted compared the larger, true disk size with what the GPT claimed, and was happy since they agreed. 12.04 respects the HPA like MacOS and Windows do ( unless it detects a partition that claims to use the protected space, then it disables the HPA to allow access to that partition ). This causes the GPT size to disagree with the HPA limited size the kernel uses, and so parted barfs. In this situation, parted *should* issue a warning and offer to fix the error.

I too was able to run the gdisk verify command on an image with the smaller size without complaint so while it is possible my assumption about gdisk is wrong, it is clear that it is doing *something* wrong since it should be complaining when the image is the smaller size, rather than when it is the larger size. Looking at the sizes in both the GPT and the MBR, only the MBR seemed to agree with the smaller size, so it seemed a good assumption that gdisk was using that size.