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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.
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.
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