[Gllug] Problem with encrypted Debian root.

[Matthew King]

Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> writes:

>> Not to mention that the position on the bus, which the OS uses, is ignored.
>
> *scream*
>
> (hang on, *ignored*? so, er, how do they number the disks? black magic?
> random? BIOS ordering?)

OK, not ignored as such, but not much attention is paid. For one thing
the BIOS is capable of swapping devices around and I've no idea what
grub does in that case. Probably something ugly. In one of my machines,
the hard discs are hdc and hdd, with cd on hda (guess who got the cables
back to front). Grub calls hdc hd0 and hdd is hd1.

> For me, this is ameliorated entirely by a half-decent initramfs and
> network booting :) I don't think I have ever been left in the crap by a
> bad boot block; if I were, netbooting would easily let me recover.
>
> Given that all my disks currently have one single partition, itself
> LVMed, I'm not sure what interactivity would bring me.

In the normal course of things, not much. Debian's all-singing,
all-dancing with knobs on initramfs does brilliantly. The few cases it's
been useful are when swapping discs around, trying to boot from one OS
to another and other times when the boot block is either moved or
missing.

In many cases it's simply the fact that it's there which means I've
rebooted and relied on grub's interactivity rather than update menu.lst
and *then* rebooted.

Matthew

-- 
I must take issue with the term "a mere child", for it has been my
invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely
preferable to that of a mere adult.
                                           --  Fran Lebowitz
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