UUIDs on drives

[Owen Townend]

2008/8/15 Rashkae <ubuntu at tigershaunt.com>:
> Derek Broughton wrote:
>> ghe wrote:
>>
>>> Then somebody had the brilliant idea of calling everything sd...
>>
>> No, somebody had the brilliant idea of using a single piece of code to
>> handle block devices where there used to be many different implementations.
>>
>>> It looks like Ubuntu's got fstab fixed and menu.lst sorta fixed (it
>>> still refers to the BIOS' (hd0,1) -- don't know, but that may be a
>>> problem with grub).
>>
>> "Feature"?  I'm not sure anybody's ever going to change Grub...
>>
>>
>
> It would be great, however, if BIOS let you explicitly define the order
> of devices, instead of just the first.  That's the next obvious step.
>

 My latest motherboard purchase has this option, rearranging the order
of disks in the list in bios rearranges the order that Grub sees them.
This is in an AWARD bios on a Gigabyte so I doubt it's specific to the
board I have.
 Taking the other approach, there seems to be active development work
towards using UUIDs throughout grub to avoid the issue in that way
instead/as well. You can already use `root=UUID=<uuid>` in the kernel
string, but are still limited to the `root (hd0,1)` type line for the
boot device/partition. This is _likely_ why another poster felt the
need to reinstall after attaching another disk rendered his system
unbootable - the bios' device order changed so grub was no longer
pointed at the right boot device. This could have been fixed by
editing menu.1st using a livecd, but it's not obvious if it's never
happened to you before.

cheers,
Owen.