On Tuesday 06 March 2007 11:34, Robert Millan [ackstorm] wrote: > - User boots off USB stick > - sda is USB, sdb is SCSI or SATA > - GRUB install on (hd0) (i.e. sda) fails. > - Manual repairing is not possible, because if you boot a rescue > system off USB stick, root disk will still be sdb. I've just done a hd-media installation from USB-stick on my EM64t box (SATA disc controller) and everything worked out of the box [0]. Both grub and /etc/fstab were set up correctly [1]. I will not deny that users _can_ hit this issue, but it has been a known issue since Sarge. Unfortunately no one has yet been able to help us find a "good enough for Debian" solution for this. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that this is generating so much confusion at the moment. As I said, it is hardly a new issues and persistent device naming has been a topic on the list on and off for the past year. Colin has said a few times that he consideres the Ubuntu solution not clean enough for Debian. David's script is nice (I've not looked at it in detail), but probably not fundamentally different from a similar script I proposed back in October [2]. Conclusion: - no, I don't feel this issue makes hd-media unreleasable; - yes, it would have been great if this was solved already; - yes, it is definitely too late to solve this issue for Etch; - yes, we should definitely document how people can fix a broken configuration (which is entirely possible) if they run into this issue; - yes, we should find a solution for this post-etch and we should probably implement something ASAP so we have plenty of time to tune it. Note that we need to find a solution that works for all architectures, for all file systems and for both permanent and removable media. Personally I also feel that all possible solutions effectively make /etc/fstab unreadable and unmaintainable. Maybe Debian should lead the way to make /etc/fstab a generated file (like e.g. modules.conf used to be). Cheers, FJP [0] Which in some ways is a pity as I had planned to use the boot failure as a basis to document how to recover from it :-/ [1] Except for creating a completely bogus entry for the usb stick itself using the devfs device name (bug filed, with patch :-) [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2006/10/msg00710.html
Attachment:
pgpNP7TFWD0uk.pgp
Description: PGP signature