Is the bios-grub partition in Ubuntu 12.04 mandatory?

I have used 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04, But I was never asked for this.

Today I tried a fresh installation of Ubuntu 12.04 and for the first time I was asked for this Grub partition of minimum 1Mb. I first tried to reinstall 12.04, but the error continued.

So I installed Fedora 16, Keeping all partitions as they were (replaced Ubuntu with Fedora), And then did another fresh installation of 12.04.

Is it ok to continue with this grub partition or is there a fault in my system's hardware? If this is a (hardware) fault, how can I fix it?

I'm using a Lenovo S10-2 Ideapad. The only OS right now installed is Ubuntu 12.04.

well, let me answer. It was /usr/bin/xorg issue that I had with firstly installed precise. I used fedora16 basically for removing precise totally (my experience tells me ubuntu can't completely erase and reinstall by itself). this 1mb grub is created by fedora. I then wanted to remove it while reinstalling ubuntu but got caution bootloader may fail. hence I have to keep this 1mb drive. but prior to yesterday, i used both fedora and ubuntu, even same CDs, but had no such partition. my question is if this partition is necessary or not? if not, how can i safely remove it from my system?

Am using only ubuntu 12.04 -- before and after (now).