Comment 22 for bug 32357

Similar to this bug and the 6 others merged with it, I also have a
situation where grub-installer picking (hd0) is not what I want. Here are
some details:

I am using d-i preseeding on a system that has both a cciss raid controller
and a fiber channel controller (appears as scsi). I specify which disk I
want to be partitioned/installed using something like:

d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/cciss/c0d0

But when grub enumerate the disks (hd0) ends up being one of the scsi disks
and grub tries to install there (and fails in my case since the disk isn't
setup). I would like a way to tell grub "please install to the same disk as
was partitioned and used for the install". Now of course you might be
partitioning and installing to multiple disks, so I guess maybe you want to
be able to say "install on whatever disk /boot is on" or something like
that.

For now the work around for this problem (at least using preseeding) is to
hardcode the device grub installs to with something like:

d-i grub-installer/bootdev string (hd4)
or
d-i grub-installer/bootdev string /dev/cciss/c0d0

but that is problematic since if you are trying to use the same preseed on
machines of differing hardware, differing amounts of controllers/disks will
cause those names to change. Better for d-i to record what did it used and
then use that.

I don't know what the patch to do this would look like but I expect that
the interface to use it would look something like:

d-i grub-installer/bootdev string bootdisk
d-i grub-installer/bootdev string rootdisk

or if you didn't want to overload that existing variable, invent a new one.

Thanks,

--
Matt Taggart
<email address hidden>