grub2 search messes with drive map

[John Little]

Hi

I've just diagnosed a vexing grub2 problem, and I think there's been a
change in grub2 behaviour on my Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid) system. The
version synaptic reports is "1.98-1ubuntu7".

I have two disks, partitioned as follows:
/dev/sda1   *     HPFS/NTFS     windows
/dev/sdb1         Linux         /, including /boot/grub
/dev/sdb2         Linux swap
/dev/sdb3         Extended
/dev/sdb5         Linux         /usr
/dev/sdb6         Linux         /home

(Note the separate partition for /usr, partly the cause of my trouble.)

I had a simple custom menu entry
menuentry 'Others' {
        configfile (hd1,1)/boot/grub/others.cfg
}

And it used to work fine.  The submenu has various rarely used stuff,
like memtest and recovery modes.  I didn't try it for some months, and
today tried to use it; grub pauses, then redisplays its main menu.

*When it starts*, grub sees /dev/sda1 as (hd0,1), and sdb1 as (hd1,1).
 But, after running

search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 91fa2fc6-ac74-4910-8154-63ad3893259d

generated by /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme, to load a background image
from /usr/share/images, hd0 and hd1 have been swapped!  hd0 is now
sdb, and hd1 is sda.

Now the doc for search says by default the variable called root is
set, but it doesn't mention changing what I might call the drive
mapping.

I've had to add a search command to my menu entry, to restore sanity.

Have I got this right? Is search supposed to reassign the device numbers?

Regards, John