Re: [PATCH] Skip partitions during OS probing

[Phillip Susi <psusi@cfl.rr.com>]

On 7/11/2011 11:55 AM, Axel Kellermann wrote:
> 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.

If you only have one controller, then the disks will tend to be 
enumerated in the same order each time, but many people have multiple 
controllers these days so the order jumbles around quite a bit.  Often 
times a USB flash stick can be detected first and get sda, bumping the 
internal hard disks down.

Even if you only have one controller, sometimes a drive can take a 
little longer to spin up and one of the other drives can finish being 
detected first.

> 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.

Fixing the underlying problem of detecting and ignoring the Win7 system 
partition would render the patch moot.  If it does really still cover a 
use-case to be able to manually specify partitions to ignore, it needs 
to be done with UUIDs or something else more stable.