Bug#574350: grub-pc: boot failure after upgrade to 1.98

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 06:46:34PM -0400, Andres Cimmarusti wrote:
> I had to do a fresh install of squeeze because I got a new hard drive.
> Shortly after finishing up the installation I full-upgraded and that pulled
> grub-pc 1.98-1 and it installed without errors.
> 
> The reason for the previous failure was that I was running 2.6.33 kernel
> from experimental. This changed my /dev/hd* to /dev/sd* and caused
> grub-setup to fail. So, in reality, you should close this bug, because it
> doesn't affect squeeze (strictly speaking). However, work might be required
> when 2.6.33 enters sid.

No, this bug (which I've merged with a cluster of other similar bugs)
should remain open because it affects all kinds of situations where
device names might change, not just the narrow situation involved in the
transition to libata.  /dev/[hs]d* device names have not been stable for
some years now, and GRUB should not be relying on them.  For example,
consider the case of removable USB devices on a system that also has
SCSI disks - which one happens to get /dev/sda is essentially random in
many configurations.

Don't worry - this bug is well-understood and we're on the path to a
fix, so there's little point trying to optimise things by closing the
bug.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]