Debian plus upgrade-from-grub-legacy

[Rob Stone]

Good evening,

I have a Toshiba A200 laptop running Debian.
I decided to upgrade to (uname -a output):-

Linux roblaptop 2.6.32-3-686 #1 SMP Thu Feb 25 06:14:20 UTC 2010 i686
GNU/Linux


A lot of other packages were upgraded, including version 1.98-1 of grub.
For nearly a week I ran successfully with it doing the chainload kludge.

Then after seeing that most things were working O.K. (exception being my
HP Officejet) I ran upgrade-from-grub-legacy.

I did not know you had to use the SPACEBAR to select the one and only
hard drive on my laptop to use as the MBR. So, when I re-booted, I
received "Error 15".

After gaining access to a shell via a live CD I then discovered that ALL
of the contents of /boot had been erased. No kernel image -- nothing.

That is NOT the Debian way of doing things.

Needless to say it took days of mucking around to put everything back
working again.

If you HAVE to write routines where choices have to be made by dumb
users like myself, do the following:-

Only one hard drive detected -- then DON'T ask, just use it.
Two or more hard drives detected -- go into a loop displaying each drive
in turn and ask the user to enter <y>es if that is the drive to use.
Once a drive has been selected, display a confirmation and if they enter
<n>o, go back into the loop. If nothing is selected, ask if they want to
abort the process or return to the loop.

Cheers,
Rob Stone