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."

Comments

How To Clone a Bootable Drive

[Doc Ruby]

How about distilling this article into a HOWTO for a "bootable Linux factory"? I keep a "reference Linux", with just the basic (Debian) system installed on its boot HD (EIDE /dev/hda[1]). When I want a new one, I attach a second HD to the seconde EIDE bus (EIDE /dev/hdc), so data is transferred across the full bandwidth of both buses. I fdisk /dev/hdc into boot and swap partitions, then tar /dev/hda1 over to /dev/hdc1 . So I've cloned my drive. But I still have to config LILO or GRUB to install into the MBR on hda. Which I always screw up (with LILO, anyway), because lilo.conf doesn't have clear docs on how to install a bootable kernel sector to a volume other than the one the current kernel image booted from. But it does do so.

Maybe I could dd the first sector of hda to hdc, which would clone the reference MBR. But I'm not sure that works if the disk geometries are different. And sometimes I do want to tweak the LILO configs for the new platform, including VGA settings etc.

So who can refactor this article to a HOWTO for that extremely helpful case, so I can look for it in six months when I need to do this process again, but have again forgotten the details?

Re:How To Clone a Bootable Drive

[Doc Ruby]

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"Boot Loader Showdown": "How To Clone a Bootable Drive"

TrollMods don't care about the topic. They just lose arguments in other threads, then anonymously attack.

Re:WHAT THE FUCK, SLASHDOT?

[KwKSilver]

Good luck Geoffry. This is the nightmare we all feared the most.--Jim from NW FL.