Re: Postscript: Grub2 in current Squeeze
On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 11:54:42PM EST, Mark wrote:
> >On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com> wrote:
[..]
> Did grub2 recognize your other OS's automatically?
grub does not recognize other OS's. It invokes a utility called
os-prober, which is a separate package, and does not IMHO do a very good
job of detecting anything.
In particular if you have an unmaintained menu.lst in a 4-year old
legacy partition that used to be /dev/hda6 and is now /dev/hda11, it
will blindly generate an erroneous stanza in your /boot/grub/grub.cfg
with usually puzzling consequences.
> I've only used grub2 for one installation and it didn't recognize
> Windows XP on my friend's machine (even though it was valid and the
> hdd would boot XP), so I Google'd around a bit and followed something
> similar to this
> http://erickoo.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/how-to-add-vista-partition-to-grub-2-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala/.
I am not familiar with Microsoft products.
> Just my experience but grub has never failed to pick up the other OS's
> automatically.
I never used this capability with legacy grub either, because I had a
few options in my kernel boot commands that matched my hardware,
something an os prober would not know about and I didn't want update
grub to overwrite my carefully crafted menu.lst.
I do likewise with grub-pc, specifying what I need in
/etc/grub.d/40_custom. This also ensures that if I move things around
on my hard drive I'm not likely to forget modifying it and updating
grub.cfg.
> I don't know if grub2 is unstable, it was just easier for some people
> (like myself) to edit menu.lst directly. People might be singing the
> praises of grub2 in a year, who knows.
If you maintain your boot environment manually, there is nothing that
prevents you from updating /boot/grub/boot.cfg directly and get rid of
everything in /etc/grub.d/ and never run update-grub again. Just make
sure you don't mix the two approaches.
CJ
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