Re: grub-probe, but in reverse?

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 05:03:44PM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 19:35 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > $ sudo grub-probe -d /dev/sda1 -t drive
> >   (hd0,1)
> > 
> > I have a reason to want to do the reverse of this: I have a
> > libparted-based program that ensures that at least one partition on a
> > disk is marked active (needed for some BIOSes), and would like to call
> > it on the disk selected for installation of GRUB in d-i. Of course
> > libparted is only going to understand OS device names. If possible I'd
> > rather avoid reading device.map by hand to figure out how to map (hd0,1)
> > back to /dev/sda1. Is there any way to do this with the code as it
> > stands, and if not would it make sense to make it possible to pass GRUB
> > device names to grub-probe?
> 
> I think device.map is fundamentally unreliable and should be obsoleted.
> I don't know where you are getting the GRUB device names, but I suggest
> that you use UUID instead.

They're entered by users choosing where to install GRUB, whom we can
hardly expect to enter UUIDs by hand. Perhaps we can figure out how to
give them a select list of available choices, which could then include
UUIDs behind the scenes ...

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden