Turns out switching to UUIDs was very simple, grub already provides the
necessary utility function. :)

The new patch is attached.


Thanks,

Axel

On 07/11/2011 08:25 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 05:55:53PM +0200, Axel Kellermann wrote:
>>> Partition numbers tend to get moved around quite frequently, so this
>>> would be a fragile configuration, and require manual entry.  It would be
>> Good point. I guess the proposed solution works well with internal HDDs,
>> as they tend to always get the same device names during system
>> initialization (at least I never observed different behaviour on my
>> machine), but could be fragile for external drives.
> 
> I have observed it on internal drives.  If you have two controllers with
> different drivers and disks on both then there is no predicting which
> driver will load and initiallize first in some cases.  Switching to UUIDs
> made the box much more reliable to boot (it was a 50/50 chance it would
> boot with the disks in the "right" order and work).
> 
>>> better to automatically notice that the partition is a Win7 system
>> I agree. But I guess on my machine it is not really grubs fault that the
>> Win7 system partition is marked as bootable. I only have one of those
>> Win7 licenses that come with recovery media, so I'm not able to do a
>> manual, clean install and it seems the recovery installation always
>> makes the system partition bootable. I'm probably not the only one
>> experiencing this kind of faulty setup...
>>
>>> partition, and ignore it.  If you must explicitly exclude manually
>>> chosen partitions, they should be specified by UUID.
>> I guess we could work with UUIDs instead of partition names, but it also
>> turns this little patch into something a bit more complicated. I'd be
>> happy to look into it, but we should first decide if we really cover a
>> use-case here or if the whole thing isn't worth the effort.