Comment 20 for bug 61108

As of Ubuntu 7.04, people install via the gui, and there is no opportunity for them to set #groot. If they don't install their OS at (hd1,0), they'll lose their ability to boot the first time they do a system update that contains a kernel update!

Let's responsibility here, and help people avoid this #groot technicality. It can be abstracted and it can be automated.

To Do:

-Add "wise auto #groot setting" functionality to the gui installation process.

-Make the update-grub command take the "root partition of the previous kernel" into consideration when setting the current kernel's root partition.

-Consider the ramifications of "preventing the update-grub command from overwriting all kernel's root partitions with #groot". If you look at the "before and after" of the /boot/grub/menu.lst file (at http://www.howtoadvice.com/DellUbuntu/ ), you'll notice that update-grub not only set newly added kernel's root partition to #groot, it also overwrites all other kernel entries' root partitions with #groot. How is this ever useful? Default usually means a value you give when a user doesn't specify. However, when it comes to a previous kernel entry in menu.lst, they've been previously specified. Why overwrite with a default value? Now in addition to not being able to boot the new kernel, they "new user of ubuntu" can't even boot his previous kernel that worked fine before he did a simple system update with the Ubuntu Update manager.

The bottom line is this. We can't allow a simple system update (with Ubuntu's Update Manager) cause a machine not to boot. We have to think this through and make a kernel-updater smart enough to choose the previous kernel's root partition!