Grub2 and os-prober

platojones · Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2012 3:45 pm Post subject: Grub2 and os-prober

Has anybody had any luck with os-prober when setting up grub2? Googling indicates that it's really poorly documented (i.e., basically nothing about it) and it has never found anything on my system. I've got a fully functional grub2/GPT/UEFI system, but I manually maintain my menu entries because os-prober has never found any OS on my system (hint: I've got 4).

I'm currently using version 1.53, but none of the previous versions for the past 6 months ever worked either.

pidsley · n00b Joined: 09 Jun 2012 Posts: 63

It works fairly consistently for me with Debian kernels/initramfs but it incorrectly identified Arch (wrong root partiton) and did not find my hand-configured kernel. I tend to keep my entries in 40_custom and switch off the os-prober (make it non-executable) just because it doesn't work well.

My Gentoo installs still use Grub legacy. I may switch the other machines from grub to syslinux.

platojones · Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2012 4:19 pm Post subject:

OK, it's not just me then. It's a debian utility after all, so Gentoo may give it problems. It's a shell script so I'm able to see what it's doing, but I just can't see why it doesn't even find my Windows 7 partition. The only thing it finds on my box, that it puts in the debug log, is my swap partition.

Oh well, I thought it could help me find out why grub doesn't find my USB hard drive during boot, but since it can't find anything on my system at all, I'll just write it off.