Comment 44 for bug 476625

#43 - delance, that version of os-prober is from before the fix, explaining why you get the problem. A bit sad that this issue wasn't fixed before releasing the Maverick CD.

Jérôme De Greef, #40 Thanks for I think that hivex is a good way to check for what entries are present in the BCBD, but do you have a good suggestion for how to use it to get reliable os-prober entries?

The way I see it, os-prober's problem is that it is depending on knowing the right names for the recovery environment and for the "real" windows patitions on all machines to work perfectly - as we have seen, with each new release a new name is added for the latter, and the former, while often named "Windows Recovery Environment" is also know by at least one other name (my "Windows Setup"), and possibly more.

Even using hivex (and I am not entirely sure it is good to have to depend on that for correct grub installation ...) it will still be a matter of knowing the correct names at install time. It seems to me hivex here would only be able to tell that there are not previously encountered, and thus unclassified, names present.

There is one other thing that might help: heuristics, in this case: IF there are two windows partitions, and one is the recovery partition, will almost always be the 1st. So maybe using that as a default case might help misidentification.

If there are two different genuine windows partitions, without a recovery partition, this might lead again to a wrong naming. But, in that case, it is very unlikely a factory install, meaning that the person who installed the machine knows what he/she is doing, and might be helped by a notification from the 1st time install of grub mentioning the issue with os-prober and what can be done to sort it. Less harmful anyway than accidentally starting a recovery (lead to losing the linux root for me - good to have backups, it lead me, amongst other things to try out natty).

I don't really see a good way to get it right out of the box, always. I hope that is just me though, and I agree that it would be good to have a pre-install hivex check to see if there are "new" entries in BCD, and warn.