Re: Some GRUB ideas

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 09:57 -0400, komputes wrote:
> You're probably right, although the focus of my question/feature request 
> is on the (hd0,0) syntax and not on the device file. I was thinking it 
> could prompt devices.map for the drive names. Grub can't use /dev/sda1 
> style syntax, you are correct, and I can't think of a logical workaround 
> other than that.
> 
> That being said, it would still be useful for the user to be able to see 
> what drive a grub has access to. Going back to the basic concept of the 
> request which was to simplify grub for the new user by displaying which 
> hard drives/partitions are available for grub to boot from (in (hd0,0) 
> syntax). This could help the user easily create a menu.lst from the grub 
> prompt/shell/menu.

If we are would to do things easy for users, I'd go for labels.  The
"search" command can set variables to partitions with the given labels.
And perhaps GRUB could be enhanced to support direct references to
partitions by labels, e.g. (:fedora)

Please note that (hd0) is BIOS specific.  It's won't be available if the
ata module is loaded.  It won't be available on non-PC systems.  Even on
the same PC, when loading from a different device, the device numbers
can shift, yet it would be desirable that a configuration file on the
hard drive can still be used by GRUB loaded from a CD or a flash drive.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin