[lug] Grub Install

[David Morris]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 10:12:31AM -0700, Lee Woodworth wrote:
> David Morris wrote:
> >I have a new mission in life:  Find the person who dreamed
> >up randomly assigning device letters at boot (e.g. /dev/sda)
> >and kill him.
> >
> >As I mentioned in the previous thread, my hard disks are
> >playing musical chairs with eachother.  Theoretically, the
> >fix is to use UUID's provided by udev.
> >
> >Except LILO can't use them.  Only option in LILO is to edit
> >lilo.conf every single time lilo is rerun.  I am *not* going
> >to go through that nightmare!
> >
> >Ok, install Grub.
> Grub is also sensitive to device enumeration order. As
> long as the bootable devices are constantly plugged in
> things can work. External SCSI devices that may or may not
> be powered up would complicate things.

Pardon me a moment while I go ballistic.

...
...

(brr, cold up here)

...
...

Is it me, or are the people over in kernel & grub
development deliberately trying to shoot themselves in the
foot?

Think about this for a moment:

USB storage devices are treated as SCSI devices (as proven
by my CompactFlash card reader).  USB has become *the* way
to add mass portable storage to a computer.  Such devices
are, by definition, not always connected.  They are even
treated by the BIOS as boot devices now.

Grub, however, will only work if the storage devices
attached to a kernel *does not change*.

LILO, the old standby, will not work because device letters
are randomly assigned.

I don't even want to *think* what this would do to a server!

I cannot think of a better way to drive people away from
Linux.  I've been using Linux for years and have a lot
vested in its use by now, but if my computer will not *boot*
reliably that is *more* than grounds for switching to
something else, perhaps MacOS.

> >Nice theory, but grub-install will not run.  It just hangs
> >and after about 20 minutes the system begins to get less and
> >less usable until eventually it crashes.  At least it leaves
> >lilo in the MBR so I can (with difficulty) boot up.
> >
> >Any ideas on how to find out why grub-install refuses to
> >work?  Or how to convince LILO to use udev disk paths?
> You don't need to use grub-install. These commands have worked
> for me with 0.9x versions of grub:
>     # grub
>     root (hd0,1)
>     setup (hd0)
>     quit

Worth a try, thanks.

> If you had the first partition (50MB) of each of your bootable
> disks reserved as /boot and they all used the same file system
> type (e.g. ext2/3), you could install grub on each of the disks
> and the BIOS boot would always start GRUB even if you have
> different external disks powered up. Note that you would need to
> make sure the /boot/grub/grub.conf and your kernel/initrd files
> are all the same on each disk.

Not even a remote possibility for many reasons I'm not even
going to begin to enumerate.

--David