YAHDF (Yet Another Hard Drive Failure?)

[Peter King]

I replaced the questionable hard drive with an SSD, without loss of data, 
and (much to my surprise) everything went reasonably smoothly. Except for
one place where I lost my way entirely. So, without further ado, here's...

                  TODAY'S QUIZ FOR EXPERTS !!!

Booted from a CD located at /dev/sr0, copied the contents of the defective
drive (/dev/sda) to the replacement drive (/dev/sdb). Then chrooted into the
replacement drive so as to install grub manually. Dropped into the grub
shell, and...

   What the heck is the grub "name" of the drive I want to install it on?






( No peeking now -- )


Hint: Grub claimed to find three hard drives (of the actual four in the
system at the time).



( Give up? -- )




Okay, if your answer was (hd1,0) for the boot partition, on the grounds
that Linux saw it as /dev/sdb, well, you'd be wrong.


The correct answer is "(hd0,0)" -- that is, as though it were /dev/sda. And
indeed once I reboot the whole thing it should be /dev/sda, and so it proved
to be.


I have no idea why.


Undoubtedly there is some corner of an obscure man page that says when you're
chrooted all devices are /dev/sda or something equally strange. But whatever
the reason is, it isn't obvious, and grub itself gives no clues what to do.

Fortunately, I guessed correctly. Well, to be honest, I didn't. I decided that
since I had no clue I'd just start with (hd0) and see whether the system
booted, and if not, try (hd1), and so on, until I ran through all the integers.
At least that's what it felt like.

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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