Merge lp://qastaging/~psusi/ubuntu/precise/installation-guide/partitions into lp://qastaging/ubuntu/precise/installation-guide

I think this removes too much information. Although I don't have specific citations for you, I've unfortunately seen even quite recent systems that had trouble booting from later in the disk and required a /boot partition.

Could you keep most of the wording about /boot partitions, and just remove the obsolete bit about partition numbering?

The documentation itself already said it is only an issue for PCs from circa 1995-1998. Reading the installation guide as a lay person, I'm thinking who cares about PCs from 14 years ago?

By the way, doesn't grub now require lba mode anyhow? So if you did still have an old bios that only does CHS, a /boot partition wouldn't help.

How many recent systems have this kind of trouble? One in a million? Is that enough to justify a section in the installation guide?

I'm not saying the documentation is correct in all respects, but you
can't just remove that big chunk of text. GRUB can handle CHS to some
extent; and in any case it isn't just CHS, there are other reasons why
you might need /boot to be near the start of the disk.

No, please don't exaggerate. If it were one in a million I very much
doubt I'd have seen multiple examples of this.

If you want a thoroughly modern example, >2TB disks are becoming common,
but in discussions with BIOS people nobody is able to tell me with any
confidence that the weakly-tested support for 64-bit reads using BIOS
calls actually works on a plurality of systems, and thus it's quite
possible that /boot needs to be in the first 2TB of the disk if you're
using GPT with BIOS (which otherwise ought to work fine in most cases)
in order to avoid lurking unreliability. While the reasoning is quite
different from that in the guide at the moment, the ultimate advice is
essentially the same.