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Re: Installer: GUIX_IMAGE as /dev/sda on some hardware?


From: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice
Subject: Re: Installer: GUIX_IMAGE as /dev/sda on some hardware?
Date: Sun, 26 May 2019 13:22:51 +0200

Giovanni,

Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
/dev/xdyN names have never been safe to use in this way

I'm not talking about partitions ;-)

Neither was I. Force o' habit. May your partitions never be in random order.

According my faulty memory (I cannot reproduce it now)
/dev/sd<something> is what the Installer writes in the bootloader
section of config.scm:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---

  (bootloader
    (bootloader-configuration
      (bootloader grub-bootloader)
      (target "/dev/sda")
      (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout)))


I didn't realise that our *installer* did this… It shouldn't. Thanks for noting this.

So it's pure coincidence that grub-install on /dev/sda succeedes on the
whole set of machines users are installing via USB media? :-O

‘Pure coincidence’ is too loaded. It almost always works! But your original question already illustrates how ‘almost always works’ leads to false inductions of ‘should work’.

The odds may be hugely in your favour, but why gamble at all?

you've discovered, they aren't to be relied on, and you should use labels or UUIDs instead.

Labels and UUIDs are for volumes, not for the whole disk ;-)

…? I must not be using the right terminology, but each drive has a ‘unique identifier’, and a human-readable label (if that human likes numbers, a lot) that isn't unique.

‘ID’ & ‘name’, then, fine, whatever we call it, my point remains :-P

Kind regards,

T G-R

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