On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 03:00:58PM -0500, pjones wrote: > On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 19:41 +0100, Molle Bestefich wrote: > > Oh, but there is a way. > > > > You could, at boot-up, calculate a md5 hash based on the first sector > > of every disk. If there's a duplicate hash, load the last sector of > > every disk also and calculate the md5 based on both. If there's still > > duplicates, add one more sector from the head of the disk. Continue > > till you have completely unique hashes, or, a (user-definable) maximum > > number of sectors to traverse has been reached. > > > > When Linux has finished bringing up IDE drivers and device-mapper > > devices, scan the disks again. (The bootloader should probably > > include information next to the md5 hashes on how many sectors it had > > to scan). There you go, Linux can easily tell which BIOS disks map to > > which Linux disks. :-). > > This idea's been entertained in a rather wide swath of different > methods. It doesn't work. If you're installing the OS and you've got > two identical disks, in both geometry and data (that is, disks that > Seagate says passed their burn-in tests, or that were just retasked from > an existing raid1 setup which haven't been artificially made unique), > you get a collision. And that's the very time you need to know where to > install a bootloader.
What about Serial Numbers from the drives? Do they all have them, are they unique? Why can't we use a combination? Look for the serial number, if missing look at the data. But how does this work when installing? Nothing has had a chance to do this yet. Something really needs to be done. _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub
