Stubborn FAT32 Boot Partition Stops Ubuntu From Booting

My old HP Core Duo Ubuntu server bit the dust last week. Seemed like a PSU issue since it booted once and ran OK for 10 minutes, but sadly, the oddball PSU in this HP case has no easy replacement. No, it’s not a normal ATX12V PSU. Whatever–a suitable replacement, must faster, was had via NewEgg. It threw me for a loop for a few hours, though. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with no issues, but then the damn thing wouldn’t boot unless I left the USB key in.

So, this seems like a known issue–use boot-repair, yadda yadda–but no, this seems to be something different. I thought I might need to mess with gparted, but I didn’t make a boot partition and I didn’t convert to non-GPT. I noticed in gparted that I had a first /sda1 partition that was FAT32 and flagged for boot. I’m thinking this was a recovery partition for this little Acer box that came with Windows 7.  Well, I wiped all the partitions and re-ran the Ubuntu install. Joy! It got the partitions right and boots on its own.