UUIDs on drives

[Rashkae]

Owen Townend wrote:
> 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.
> 

Actually, so long as your grub /boot is installed on the same drive as
your boot drive (and yes, you should always do this, hard to mess up
drive 0 order), then this can even be fixed on the fly from the grub
menu, no need for boot cd.