Re: Question about GRUB recovery using Debian 7.x LiveCD

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

Quoting Bret Busby (bret.busby@gmail.com):
> 
> Neither that screen, nor the one that showed the partitions,
> identified using the UUID's (which, to a user like me, in the context
> of trying to restore the GRUB multi-OS selection bootloader, are
> meaningless, and, as useful as listing the subatomic particles, or the
> elements of the Periodic Table), showed the labels that had been set
> for the partitions, and so, did not show into which partition, each of
> the operating systems had been installed.

I think UUIDs are here to stay, whether or not you supplement them,
as I do, with LABELs or whatever. In my case, Debian poked them in my
eye when they suddenly appeared in the output of df, causing the
interesting part to be half-wrapped around the screen. In turn that
was caused by their use in the newly installed /etc/fstab in place
of the old /dev/sdaX etc. That's going back some years.

With hot plugging and so on, you really can't get away with /dev/...
any more unless you want to accidently reformat the wrong partition.
And not everyone sets LABELs, so there's not much choice. As long as
you don't clone a partition without changing the UUID, and you don't
subvert UUID generation, they're unique and safe.

And Grub is a prime candidate for their use, what with all the options
for swapping drives around in the BIOS, partitions numbered in the
wrong order etc.

Cheers,
David.