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The Boot Loader Showdown
Francesca writes "What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article from IBM, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders -- LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) -- and review the pros and cons of each." From the article: "Most simply, a boot loader loads the operating system. When your machine loads its operating system, the BIOS reads the first 512 bytes of your bootable media (which is known as the master boot record, or MBR). You can store the boot record of only one operating system in a single MBR, so a problem becomes apparent when you require multiple operating systems. Hence the need for more flexible boot loaders."
What kind of study would fail to include THE single most popular and widespread bootloader in the world?
That would be...Windows Boot Manager.
I've played around with Ubuntu and now want to get all my disk space back. I'm running Windows XP. How do I uninstall grub safely so that the computer just boots into WinXP?
Sounds like a stupid thing, since no one would ever want to uninstall linux, but why is this information so hard to find?
Personally, this makes it hard for me to tell friends to try out linux. Because trying it out may mean having grub (or lilo) installed forever...
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I wish that the article had more details. Try adding a few scsi cards or fiber channel hbas to a box and see how well any bootloader likes it - it probably won't - your device names will have changed. Uusually devlabel works, but some RH installs I've seen, still use /dev/xyz# for your swap partition (makes sense, because devlabel looks at information in your filesystem). When you add a "disk controller" card, this device name changes and you boot without a swap partition.
My GOD you are unimaginative. It's so upsettingly obvious for everyone outside the x86 world that the lot of us are just plain laughing when this issue is brought up.
For a weekend project, I was planning on rebuilding the OS on a spare PC I have.
I was just about to install a flexible boot loader. Tell me more about your better BIOS. I'm sure I'll be enjoying it this evening instead of the dumb old boot loader I was about to install.
Oh wait, you weren't solving a problem, you were merely suggesting an entirely new platform. Oh, oh ho ho ha ha, silly me. Yes, honestly, why isn't it that all these stupid people don't develop a completely new architecture to deal with every nuanced problem that arises? Surely, sir, you are a genius.
Okay, lets all say this together......
Slashdot is NOT CNN!!!
Looks like someone needs to up their dosage;)
How have things changed over the last year when it comes to booting from usb pendisk or hard disk whatever?
Every time I try it, it's still not quite there. For instance, I can boot knoppix 3.9 from my usb cdrom but once it loads far enough it can't find the usb cdrom and loses track of it's filesystem consequently. That always bugged me considering it can boot from it just fine. I'd love to have a rescue usb pen drive that had both windows and linux bootable rescue installations available. I've never been able to pull it off.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Compatibility reasons. Why do modern x86 processors still have an A20 gate? Or, for that matter, why does Real Mode still exist? There's no real reason for it if you're only running modern OSes, but Intel/AMD/... know that there *will* be flak if they do get rid of these - somewhere, someone's still using DOS or something similar, and wants to be able to continue to do so.
That's it, mostly.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Not just Americans, either, but poor black Americans. Anyone with the means to get out has already fled. The only folks that are left are the 1/4 of the population that do not own cars.
Reality check: Ain't gonna be no drowned, white mofos in Noo Orlins. They drove the SUVs out.
RealChex Too: Gulf Coast oil platforms provide 15% of domestic oil. Noo Orlins's ports provide 1/3 of all oil imports to the US. Expect $70 a barrel by Tuesday.
Having rebuilt a multitude of x86 hardware and fought several times with the oddities of the PC legacy, the choice between LILO and GRUB is a no-brainer to me.
... and you need to get into a running Linux system to fix the boot loader "settings". If the hardware is unsupported by the live CD you have at your fingertips (e.g. MegaRAID) you are royally screwed up.
...), you can just try around like root(hd0,0) ... root(hd1,0) ... etc. until you find your partition.
... functionality with which one can select an image to boot into just once. If this fails and you remotely reset the server, it boots back into a known good state. Very handy to try dangerous changes to a remote server.
Every now and then, after changing/reordering hard drives (from on-board to off-board etc.), changing the controller etc. LILO might stuck somewhere like LI or 0101010101 or
With GRUB, as long as the stage 2 gets loaded, you can always change the settings manually from within a minimalistic command line. If you do not know which drive gets which number from the BIOS (0x80, 0x81,
The only reason I kept LILO on some headless servers co-located at some distant places was the lilo -R
Now that GRUB also provides this option with grub-reboot and GRUB can also be set up with a nice graphical splash screen, there is no reason why I would ever want to install LILO.
Mark