Bug#712907: grub-installer: No longer installs automatically on a normal machine with one hard drive

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Cyril Brulebois, le Thu 20 Mar 2014 14:51:32 +0100, a écrit :
> Salvatore Bonaccorso <carnil@debian.org> (2014-03-20):
> > It looks bootdev could be preseeded[1], at least for a test for a VM
> > preseed the following worked for me:
> > 
> > d-i grub-installer/bootdev string /dev/vda
> > 
> >  [1] https://bugs.debian.org/666974
> > 
> > But having string (hd0) does not seem to work here (have not checked
> > why), which would be nicer to have more generalised preseed files as
> > previous possible (for say when having machines having a /dev/vda or a
> > /dev/sda ...).
> 
> First of all, I'm not familiar with d-i best practices. So maybe the
> following won't make sense.
> 
> We could imagine either proposing another variable which would take
> specifications like “(hd0)” and do what's needed to convert them back to
> /dev/foo stuff, or detect (based on what? parens?) when a conversion is
> needed for the bootdev variable that was passed, and do that.

Well, grub-installer actually already does something like this in the
auto-detect phase. It tries to be very careful about not using an hd0
that would actually be a USB stick, but apparently (considering the bug
reports we have seen) it's not reliable enough.

We at the very least need to document this in the preseed file of the
installer, and probably in the relase as this will hit all automated
installations.

Samuel