On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 01:51:59AM +0200, Diederik de Haas wrote: > On maandag 15 juli 2019 00:33:31 CEST Colin Watson wrote: > > > In the not too distant future, I'll remove that old drive (with WinXP on > > > it) from my system and my guess is that I then will have a problem. > > > > That shouldn't be the case: we store the installation device using a > > /dev/disk/by-id/ path, which isn't affected by removing other disks. > > It's not just any disk, it's the disk that grub-install is writing to on > upgrade (iiutc), i.e. 'hd0,msdos2'. It should then boot (directly) from > my NVMe drive, with has a gpt partition table. Pointing my BIOS to > boot from that NVMe drive caused this problem for me and changing > that to the drive-to-be-removed, fixed it. > Would that still not matter?
Yep, I understand your situation. The Debian GRUB packaging remembers which device it should run grub-install on using a /dev/disk/by-id/ path, which you can see in the output of "sudo debconf-show grub-pc | grep install_devices:". This is a stable reference to the device which is not affected by adding or removing other disks (unlike e.g. /dev/sd* device names, which can be affected by such things). You certainly do need to run "dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc" to match what your BIOS is configured to boot from. However, once you do that, removing the old drive shouldn't be a problem. > (I might do a complete fresh install in which case my worry would be moot) Of course you can, but it shouldn't be necessary for this. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]
