Re: grub-probe fails during grub2 update (Debian)

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 12:07 +0200, Robert Millan wrote:

> I propose that if grub-probe can't find an entry in device.map to convert the
> device it just found to a grub drive, it runs grub-mkdevicemap and tries again.
> 
> Other approaches would be to kill device.map completely and just pipe the
> information from grub-mkdevicemap directly, but I think that might be too
> radical.
> 
> What does everyone think?

I would explore the possibility of retiring device.map completely or
limiting its use to some rare cases.

In the vast majority of cases, the installer should not rely on knowing
the BIOS numbers of the devices involved in the boot process.  BIOS
provides the boot drive, which should generally be trusted.  The
installer only needs to know whether the media is a hard drive to enable
a workaround for buggy BIOSes providing a wrong boot drive.

I'm not sure about EFI and Open firmware, but I think the situation is
similar.  There should be enough information to find the boot drive at
the boot time without requiring any guesswork in the installer.

We may need to tell GRUB what device to use to look for additional files
when the boot process involves more than one drive.  But even then, I'd
rather prefer that GRUB uses labels, not hardcoded BIOS numbers.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin