Slashdot Mirror
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.
*Bangs head on table* Now I wish I had this page when I tried to install Gentoo over the weekend. Call me dumb but I couldn't get it to dual boot with Grub. Worked great with Lilo tho :)
Its just a shame you have to rewrite Lilo stage 1 when you change stuff. Though I've never really got the hang of the Grub command line (why -1 for partitions, eh?!) so I'll stick with Lilo - its easy enough with a boot or livecd to fix anyhow.
Grub's quicker though isn't it?
Dug
There are pros to Lilo?
It's such a heap of crap. The only reason it's still used is because people were brought up on it.
Well, at least this article has some technical content, and is not just-another-"review"-of-a-distro consisting only of screenshots from the installation.
I use AMD64 Gentoo, dual booting with Windows XP Pro. Of course, LILO doesn't work with AMD64, so I have to use Grub. The bad part here is that Grub hangs whenever I try to get it to load Windows. I don't think it likes a 32 bit kernel image. So.... I have to go into the BIOS and change primary boot drives everytime I want to switch. I want a bootloader that can do that for me, or at least a way to make Grub do it. (Of course, I never really boot into Windows...)
I logged in as root and got:
/sbin/lilo -v -v
/sbin/lilo -v -v
;-)
[root@localhost root]#
Then I typed:
#
And nothing happened... The entire line looked like:
root@localhost root]# #
What is wrong here?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yes, a necessary article! These details can be valuable if/when a hard drive crashes and the boot sector gets damaged.
then microsoft could write a winLoader to load windows if you wanted to dual boot your linux machine :-)
seriosly for anyone who uses linux clusters or is otherwise uninterested in Dual boot, it makes sense to flash you roms and get it over with.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We gentoo users look at it every time we upgrade the kernel :)
I used to be a Lilo fan, until I ran into trouble with it on my IBM laptop -- it took WAY longer at the part where it loads the kernel to memory than it had any business to, a stage that goes by so fast it's easy to miss on most computers. Yeah, it's got a P4-based Celery in it, but my laptop's not THAT slow. I've seen Pentium I systems go through that stage faster.
Switched to Grub, problem went away. Whatever. Guess I'll just use it from now on.
C'mon, its still more related to computers that most of the recent shit on /.
Some of the info on there was really useful to me, btw. Maybe if it helps a few people get into using Linux, etc, then it can only be a good thing, no?
Dug
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.
A problem I see is that GRUB has too much brains for its own good. It needs to understand all filesystems it can possibly boot. If you upgrade your foofs to a new version that can be misunderstood by GRUB, use an exotic fs or even the newest donation of IBM/SGI/whoever, you run into deep shit if GRUB tries to read the files in a way even minutely different from the newest spec.
Bootloaders of the past (hell, even I wrote one that was primitive but worked) had the selection and actual loading separated. You had a piece of code inside the partition table (and perhaps track 0), which in turn passed control to the actual bootloader of the OS which you selected. This approach was a lot better where dual-boot configs are concerned.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Just a thought.
Hope this helps.
P.S.: Yes, I know you can use the Windows Boot Manager to boot Linux, but frankly not many people do, because its a major pita to say the least.
this text is not here.
sum.zero
Given all the concern with rootkits, backdoors, worms, spyware, et al, it would seem that a nonflash-ROM bootloader could provide a secure micro-OS that in turn checks and helps maintain the integrity of the main OS. A boot-time diagnostic and some key read-only API code segments (encompassing access to crucial functions such as encryption, hash calculation, memory access, disk access, UI access, network access, etc.) would help ensure that the main OS was not compromised and was less susceptible to malware.
A small OS, even one with a GUI, can fit in less than a MB. Perhaps a heavily secured, stripped-down copy of some stable version of *nix could provide a high-integrity read-only core underlying a more sophisticated, extensible, and flexible full-featured OS.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Hey, it just occurred to me: shouldn't GRUB be the "GRub Unified Bootloader," to keep with the tradition of recursive/redundant acronyms?
Evil is the money of root.
That's interesting, GRUB loads glacially on my 933 (but not on my 2Ghz), I would have thought tiny LILO wouldn't have any speed problems.
Reak geeks still use shoelace...
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
LILO's "compact" option would probably have helped you out here.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
$ file /boot/bzImage
/boot/bzImage: x86 boot sector
Murder? Is this more intelligent design bullshit?
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?
--
make install -not war
- Mac OS X will bring some of the most tech-phobic users to Intel in mid-2006 and much will be talked about setting up one's computer to boot different OS's if there is no "Red Box" included.
- Boot loaders are a big security point of failure and may rise again as a popular exploit if easier targets like Word Macros ever die off. IMHO knowledge is better protection than ignorance though.
- Declining interest in boot loaders could solidify Microsoft's goal of being the only OS people want to use. Open Source boot loaders aim for versatility; Microsoft aims for extreme ease of use and zero versatility. If the first chapter of every linux install book is how to troubleshoot your boot loader; this is great at maintaining Windows monopoly.
Boot loaders aren't really sexy, but they are important. Hence any article that tries to build some interest in them is a good thing (even if this one may have some imperfections in it).How do you figure that? Provided you have a machine with a classic BIOS (I've never touched an EFI machine), the processor is started in x86 real mode. LILO is perfectly runnable under these conditions.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
You have no choice in the matter. The end.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Just for reference. fixboot fixes something else (NTLDR? first sector of booting partition? I forget...).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
No text.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
If you log in as root, you might see a prompt that ends in #.
:-)
If you type # in a Bash shell, the rest of the line is handled as a comment.
But it is convention to tell users to type a command and start it with a # to denote root login. If you type the # however, Bash interprets it as a comment and doesn't do anything
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yaboot.
Not much of a choice there.
If somebody's heard of another PPC (NewWorld) boot loader, let me know.
~You laugh because I'm different, I laugh because I'm insane~
GRUB rocks. Its just too easy to render a computer unbootable with LILO (not permanently, of course; but it's still annoying). Why should I have to rewrite the boot sector just because I want to change what I call a particular boot option?
Interesting to hear of people's GRUB problems with Windows - I've never had an issue with this. My dual boot machines have been 98SE or XP Pro alongside Red Hat or Fedora. GRUB setup works out of the box. I've got to admit I've only used multiple partitions on one disk though - never done it with different OSes on different disks.
#DeleteChrome
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;)
Actually, I've been having trouble getting distros that set it up correctly. I have 2 sata and 2 ide drives. The various distros I've tried insist on putting grub or lilo on the mbr of hda instead of sda, even though the boot order in the bios is clearly set to boot from the sata drives.
Suse 10 beta 2 was the first to get it right.
...not even for comic relief?
Linux BIOS. All the power of Linux, now booting your computer!
Try http://www.openbios.info/project/
...are you assuming that just because Apple chose x86 for its chips that they will dump OpenFirmware for a BIOS? I don't think so. Too many other parts of the OS would have to change.
If you want to run another OS on Apple86, you will need to throw yaboot into the discussion.
To load Windows, GRUB just chain-loads the bootloader on the primary Windows partition (what Windows will use as C: drive). That's actually 16 bit code, even on AMD64.
WinXP 64 bit ed may be different, but your post suggests you're using the basic XP.
If I recall correctly a definition like:
root (hd0,0)
chainload +1
should do the trick (adjusting root to match your win32 c: ). I use Fedora, so to be honest it "just works".
*HOWEVER* it sounds like you're trying to boot XP off a secondary disk. If XP thinks that disk is the primary disk (ie you installed XP then rearranged the disks), it'll get really confused when you load its boot sector, and will fail to boot. I don't know if it's an easy thing to fix - I've always just installed windows where I expect it to live (it installs quite happily on a secondary disk).
You might be able to boot the XP cd, run "fixboot" and "fixmbr" from the recovery console, then re-install GRUB from a Linux rescue CD.
Not everybody missed it. I thought it was funny, even before reading all the comments by the people who completely missed it. :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What's so hard about it's syntax? If you refer to how it identifies say the 1st drive and 2nd partition in the system as hd0,1 then learn how to count.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When Linux doesn't need to load "GRUB" or "LILO" but can just load "the boot loader" it'll be one more step in the right direction. Having a Proper Name for every thing in the OS is so annoying. I realize that a lot of people covet the fact that Linus (and OSS in general) have lots of choices. That's great. But realize that if you want to bring in Windows people, having two or three of everything, and giving them all their own names, is just tiresome. Maybe what I am saying isn't so much that you need to kill off one of the boot loaders. All I'm saying is that a distro that wants to bring in newbies should not have any proper names for any piece of software except the name itself "Linux For Users Of Windows". Everything else is just "the boot loader" or "the window manager" etc. At least when presented to the user. I mean if in the dev community you want to talk about GNOME or KDE or LILO or GRUB or whatever, that's fine. Just leave the windows user easing into the Linux and OSS world *out of it*.
Once upon a time computer hardware was rather expensive. Spending as much as a decent used car would cost on a 2nd or 3rd box to run another OS wasn't a practical reality for a great many.
But today? A rather high powered machine can be had new for a couple hundred. Add to this fact that 99.9999% of users who want/need multiple OSes have gone through a few upgrade cycles already and thus have hardware otherwise doing nothing...and it quickly becomes apparent that optimizing a system to handle booting multiple OSes is nothing but a complete and total waste of time.
If you want to multi-boot for some geek fun, more power to you, but so far as practical use is concerned there is absolutely, possitively, zip, zero, zlitch use for it. This story is front page news worthy...how exactly?
My
After all, Apple is switching to Intel... ;)
Anyone remember XOSL? I thought it was great.
Unfortunately the Open Source model didn't work
out so great for it:
http://xosl.sourceforge.net/manifesto.html
No longer active..
Mirror of the Original Site:
http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/
Primary boot loaders are where the first stage of the boot loader is installed on the MBR (per the previous description). Secondary boot loaders are where the first stage of the boot loader is installed onto a bootable partition.
Primary boot loaders are where?
Secondary boot loaders are where?
The author's usage of "where" here is very odd. I had to read these sentences several times to figure out that the author wasn't telling me that both of these loaders are where the first stage of the boot loader is installed.
I would definitely have preferred something human-readable like "Primary boot loaders have the first stage of the boot loader installed on the MBR...."
Writers: Don't use "where" this way... please!
Grammar police - over and out.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I think they better contribute the Boot loader article at Wikipedia instead duplicating efforts
No, I believe there is some neigh-insurmountable problem in getting a bootloader to hand off control back to the bios for a CD boot.
The author says "Unlike the Linux boot loaders, the majority of Windows boot loaders will not allow you to load Linux."
o ft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
I don't know what he calls a majority, but the NT loader (used by Windows NT, 2K, XP, 2003) can boot Linux. It's just that Microsoft is being a pain about it. You have to first dd the first 512 bytes of your partition, save those to a file, and create an entry in boot.ini which points to that file.
For example:
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/cpart/linux.mbr bs=512 count=1
[Boot Loader]
Timeout=5
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINNT
[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINNT="Micros
C:\linux.mbr = "Linux"
It's better to try something like Smart Boot Manager. It brings up a menu allowing you to boot from any of your listed devices.
I have used it several times when installing Linux on older laptops that do not allow CD-booting.
I think most of my bootloader issues stem not from the inadequacy of bootloaders themselves but from the myriad different slightly incompatible partitioning tools, none of which seems to get everything quite right. To this day only LILO can load linux for me (GRUB installs just fine and then can't find the right drive to read the menu.lst from) and I can't complete a windows install because it can't understand the partition scheme -- eh, who needs it anyway. Both bootloaders work great as long as the disk is set up right, as far as I've been able to tell; GRUB is preferable for boot-time flexibility but LILO seems to be more tolerant of my crapped up partition layout.
... is there anything which just works?
I would guess that this type of problem is quite widespread; it seems that there are a multitude of ways to get in trouble with most of the partition tools available currently. Some of them still seem to have a hard time dealing with large disks on older BIOSes, some are incompatible in varying degrees with the way Windows wants things done, some will report problems without offering solutions, and some don't see any problems at all (if only Windows and Grub were so blind.) I've tried ranish, parted, fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk,
Grub *seems* to be undeveloped but some brave guys are developing grub-2, which looks much nicer...
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-2.en.html
I don't have the links, but Google is your friend:
/boot partition if it doesn't natively support your / partition.
XOSL -- Xtended Operating System Loader
Pros:
- an actual GUI in a bootloader
- support for loading keystrokes into the keybuffer, which gives it indirect support for simpler keystroke-based bootloaders like Lilo -- it can "type" in a kernel name for Lilo to load.
- relatively easy to install from Win98 -- I believe it can even use a FAT partition to store its stuff on.
- Password protection, can boot a default entry after a timeout.
- Entirely configurable from inside the bootloader -- and it's user-friendly, due to the built-in windowing system.
Cons:
- Not much direct support for anything. While it can load Linux through Grub or Lilo, and it can boot CDs through SmartBootManager, it's really a very simplistic x86 bootloader with a very advanced GUI.
- Support for booting a default requires a timeout, meaning that 90% of the time, when you're just booting the default OS, you have to wait an extra few seconds or press a keystroke -- and if you don't want to boot the default OS, you have to hit a key at just the right time to select a different one.
- Doesn't seem to be configurable outside the bootloader, meaning if you download a howto on configuring XOSL, you have to print it out and reboot in order to configure.
GRUB: Grand Unified Bootloader
Pros:
- Only bootloader I know of that supports the Multiboot spec, which unfortunately is a "standard" supported by only one bootloader (Grub) and one OS (Hurd) -- but it's still pretty cool that Grub could, in theory, insert kernel modules on boot, eliminating most initrds.
- Contains a built-in commandline and actual FS support, so a mistyped or forgotten menu entry is no problem -- type it in manually to boot, then fix the menu entry from your main OS, not a rescue disk.
- Powerful menu system -- the "configfile" command allows for multiple nested menus. Password protection.
- Config file is readable an Unix-ey, and is a plain Unix text file parsed directly by Grub -- no need to type a command after each kernel update.
- Supports booting from PXE (giving multiple netbooted images as a menu)
- Supports booting from CD, allowing an easy menu to access multiple kernels and tools like memtest86.
Cons:
- Like XOSL, it lacks actual support for booting from CDs or net. You can install it to a CD or Net, in which case you can probably also boot stuff from the hard drive, but if it's run from the hard drive, it can't boot CD or net.
- Lacks XOSL's keybuffer feature (which is probabyl unique), meaning if you want to use SmartBootManager to boot a CD, you will see the Grub menu, and then the SBM menu.
- Since it groks FSes, you may need a separate
- Commandline, while useful, really only protects you from typos in grub.conf. It doesn't protect you from forgetting to install Grub to the MBR in the first place, or reinstalling if the stage 1.5 files got physically moved around.
- Like XOSL, booting a default requires a timeout.
NTLDR -- NT Loader
Pros:
- Already installed on Windows NT based OSes.
- Supports NTFS, and can boot most x86 boot images if they are available on the boot NTFS partition.
- Plain-text config file.
Cons:
- No native support for anything but NT and chainloading (x86 boot images)
- Menu system is bad. It seems locked into a 30 second timeout, and like XOSL and GRUB, you have to have the timeout to have a default.
- No native support for booting other partitions -- this can be accomplished by putting Grub or another bootloader into an image file, but it's not a trivial process, especially considering you have to redo it often.
- Not open source. It has limitations, and you can't do a damn thing about it.
Lilo -- Linux Loader
Pros:
- Dirt simple. No flashy menus or windows or FS support -- it just loads a kernel and goes.
- Plain text config file, with a simple command t
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Boot loaders are a big security point of failure
Bullshit.
If you have physical access to the machine and can get to the boot prompt, it doesn't matter one whit about the "security" of your loader, you already have root access.
Even with a completely secure bootloader, it's not like you couldn't boot off a CDROM, floppy disk, or thubmdrive. Umm.. so that would mean that the *BIOS* is a bigger "security point of failure".
So you'd need a completely secure bootloader, *AND* a completely secure BIOS. Oh, but then you can just take the HD out and stick it in another machine, and *POOF* there goes your completely secure machine.
So what does this mean? It means that the *ARCHETECTURE* is the "security point of failure."
Fix that, then come talk to me about how insecure the bootloader is.
Can't remember if I had that set or not.
Not that any of my other systems ever had a problem with the set of options that I used on there. Just my laptop. So weird.
Anyway, now that I've got Grub figured out, I like it better. No having to remember to run Lilo on every kernel recompile.
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
This is like asking which people prefer more vi or emacs, or Captain Picard vs. Captain Kirk.
Expect all the real nerd freaks to come out of the woodwork for a nerd factor of 9.7 on the nerdoscale.
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.
There's no need to be looking around for an OS to load. The current OS should be incontrovertably the OS to load. Want to load another OS? Copy its boot process over the current one. In the same vein, programs shouldn't be looking around for settings, for they can be quickly recompiled in.
'Tech News' is an oxymoron. No piece of technology 'big' enough to make the news is actually new. Meaning that tech news can only be about someone re-inventing the wheel three years ago. Anything with actual news value (Microsoft sueing someone, Google turning/not turning evil, Linus Torvalds saying something (anything!)) has little to do with technology.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Seems like a college Freshman's first essay on anything computer related. Seriously. Its well put together, simple, and consise, without actually doing anything.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
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.
Putting in other words:
1. With grub I had to read the manual.
Now there's another:
2. Grub didn't load in my roommate's SATA HD on his amd64. He had to switch to LILO. Problems with his BIOS ? Probably. Grub didn't load.
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
After having worked with OpenFirmware on an OldWorld Powerbook, I can't really say I agree. It's a buggy peace of shit. Give me something that actually works.
back when i had IDE hard disks (before 'ohhh sata hard disks sound cool'), all was well in my sheet metal black case, LILO nestled neatly in the MBR dual booting slackware and windows. now with a sata disk for windows, and a IDE disk for slackare (as well as an empty sata disk meant for linux, if i could omly figure out how to work the damn thing on linux!!) i now have LILO on a floppy, and take it out when i need to boot windows.
thats because it is an oldworld mac, it was buggy. newworld macs are much better.
Padlock.
You didn't think that goofy deal with the whole in it on the back of the case was just decoration did you?
And yes yes, before you get into tails of bolt cutters let just be clear on something, if someone really wants into a system, they can get in to it. The whole idea is to make it more expensive to the person trying to break in than it's worth but putting as many road blocks as possible.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
a sweet bootloader for OS X?
i mean, it's probably known that the OS X system has the ability to butt into a pseudo loader screen if you hold down option on boot up. this give you a nice blue screen with the icon of, say, OS X or a cd or OS 9 if you have it installed. it shold be pretty easy to extend that, right? I mean, i want a blowfish icon showing up for my open bsd partition, and maybe a penguin for linux. Try as I might i cannot seem to find any documentation on setting that up, or writing a program to do it for me. If i have to delve into the open firmware guts i can, but it seem slike such a waste to overlook this nice built in bootloader for 3rd party programs.
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
It's a simple choice, really:
Grub:
1) shutdown -r now.
2) Hover over console, hoping not to get distracted during the bootloader prompt. Maybe we need to bump that timout a bit higher?
Lilo:
lilo -r ; shutdown -r now => go get coffee.
I have 4 OSen on two disks (2 Linux distros, Windows XP, and NetBSD), and grub works fine booting all of them.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
...it is. none of this fancy text interface crap, just a line of text asking me what o/s I want before it automatically gives me my favorite. Don't remember my options? just hit tab...
It's really not that hard to figure out...
-everphilski-
- Install Linux on any free partition on any drive -- during the install process, dont bother installing a boot record or boot sector anywhere.
-
Copy grldr.exe and menu.lst from http://grub4dos.sf.net/ into c:\ .
-
Edit c:\menu.lst to point to the correct partition, directory, and filenames for any/all of the kernel and initrd's you installed on the linux partition:
-
Addto c:\boot.ini .
Done. Notes:i use grub to have a smart boot manager image as a boot option, that way i don't have to mess with the bios of my laptop if i want to boot from cd, i leave the bios set to boot from hard disk. using memdisk i can boot floppy images.
/boot partition in which i put the tomsrtboot floppy image, the smart boot manager flopppy image as well as memdisk which i found at http://syslinux.zytor.com/
to do this use smart boot manager on a floppy, configure it to autoboot from cdrom, save the config back to the floppy, then save that floppy image and get grub to boot it when you select 'cdrom' from the grub boot menu, as far as i know lilo won't boot a floppy image or memdisk, i also have an option in grub to boot the 2.8mb tomsrtbt image as an emergency tool,
my menu.lst looks like this (note, in the article this file seemed to be called grub.conf):
blah blah
usual stuff
###snake's extras
title cdrom
kernel(hd0,1)/memdisk
initrd (hd0,1)/sbm.img
title tomsrootboot
kernel (hd0,1)/memdisk
initrd (hd0,1)/tomsrtbt.img
(hd0,1) is my
very useful
snake
No current FAQ, and documentation is "under development". However the CVS changelog indicates it is under active development by a number of people (Vincent Pelletier, Vesa Jääskeläinen, Yoshinori K . Okuji, Hollis Blanchard during the course of August to give credit where credit is due). The recent focus seems to be on the sparc64 platform. Has anyone been adventerous enough to actually try to install and use it in an x85/AMD64 environment?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
There's no need to be petty just because somebody has pointed out that other platforms provide better solutions to low-level booting than your own preferred platform.
Personally, I use x86 daily as a laptop, but far prefer Sun's OBP as a boot environment. Being able to set "auto-boot? = true" (or false), "diag-level", set a list of boot devices to try, in order, and failthrough until one works, set the tty settings of the parallel port (or, these days, the Lights-Out-Management subsystem) for remote console access, and countless other features.
An earlier post from myself showed that I managed to get an x86 system (with a patched GRUB) to boot Windows/Linux/Solaris on demand, remotely, but I can't find a vendor which supports this, I used a patched GRUB. The x86 BIOS has no concept of control of the system, from low-level testing, network probing, SCSI probing, etc, etc.
Don't knock what you don't know.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Grub can't boot from CD or floppy (please correct me if I'm wrong).
I have a computer with grub as a bootloader. The BIOS in that very computer is a bit special in that it doesn't appear to be able to boot from a CD (it gives an error on a perfectly good CD drive). I would be so thrilled if I could boot from a CD using grub like I could do with lilo.
As some have written, ditching bios will in the long run be good.
I was surprised the FreeBSD bootloader did not come up. It worked well for me when triple booting.
Options are nice, I wish some Linux distro's would give three options for boot loaders.
I mean some give you 8 options for text editors.
Also - how does Mac OsX do it? Do they utilize the FreeBSD or do they do something completely different?
I don't think i'd be brave enough to try *anything* in an x85 environment, ;-)
Coming from a Mac / { 68k, ppc } background, I can't understand why you people put up with BIOS.
You know, to boot multiple OSes. On older G3's (and certainly anything before that) you have to run Linux from inside MacOS, because they can't boot anything but MacOS.
And I use the NT Loader as my boot manager to switch between Windows XP and Gentoo Linux. This makes my life much easier when I format and install Windows every few months, to keep it clean and slim. Well, I do not need to do this to my Gentoo Linux! :)
w00t
Timely too, for me. I've actually been futzing around today trying to get Linux to boot off a USB hard drive. Some people collect stamps, I do pointless stuff with computers. We all need a hobby.
Please.. Shouldn't you kids be out on a date tonight?
you must be pretty fucking dumb
it couldn't be much simpler
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
Clearly x86 BIOS is dying
Who was being petty? I was responding to a guy who was scolding someone for using a boot loader instead of coming up with a new BIOS. I was being reasonable. If you figure out who was being petty, think about letting me know... then think about whether or not I care.
Open firmware (Apple's implentations at least), has some fairly lamentable problems. I can't get this oldworld powermac to load anything, and I've spent a few good hours just reading documentation on open firmware commands and techniques. This particular machine, however, loads the OF onscreen, and I'm sure that all newworld Macs default to this as well. As far as I know, serial console is only the default on particularly old versions of OF, and it may be possible to change this setting with the MacOS "Systemdisk" utility (basically an OF updater).
I'm surprised it's not already used in some bass-ackwards hackjob form on PC's. Open Firmware would be an overclocker's wet dream.
/ .properties
Seriously... you get fine-tuning control over the clock speed of any device on the system. Don't believe me? How 'bout an example? If you have a Mac, go into OF (hold option-apple-o-f at boot).
- type dev
- type
See that "clock-frequency" item? Yeah, that's the hex value in Hz of your system bus. You can change it with setenv. You can really screw things up by changing this setting, so don't blame me if you hose your Mac this way.
More resources:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
And one more resource that seems to suggest that the new Intel-based Macs will need to have Open Firmware or a suitable replacement by release:
Universal Binary Info
The best thing about grub is that as long as it's correctly loaded onto your MBR (not particularly difficult) you don't really need a config file at all. Anything which can go in the config file can be typed at the command-line. That's really useful in a bootloader, which otherwise can be particularly difficult to fix when you make a boneheaded mistake. GRUB has saved me several times with this feature. It's also handy when you want to boot into a different runlevel or whatever, it's easy to edit the kernel parameters before booting.
/sbin/lilo to update the MBR.
The other best thing is that you don't need to do much when you do something like install a new kernel or initrd; just update the config file (and you really don't even need to do that, see above). With Lilo you have to remember to run
The worst thing about GRUB is that it was written for the Hurd, and has a Hurd-centric view of disks which can be difficult to work with in other operating systems.
I used to be a Lilo fan, until I ran into trouble with it on my IBM laptop -- it took WAY longer at the part where it loads the kernel to memory than it had any business to, a stage that goes by so fast it's easy to miss on most computers.
... I just can't :(
That's funny - I had an almost identical problem using grub with my ASUS laptop (used to take yonks to load stage 1.5), which forced me to switch to lilo. Lilo's more painful (have to re-run it each time you install a new kernel, doesn't have a nice command-line option) but at least it works and works consistently.
I'd like to like grub
Yeah, Lilo always Just Worked(tm) for me. That's why it took me a while to decide that it was the problem in this case; I spent several days (not all day every day, mind you, but a bit here and there) looking at other possibilities, then finally thought "hey, I wonder if Grub will have the same problem?" 10 minutes later, sure enough, problem solved.
:)
:(
I've certainly had my share of problems with Grub in the past when I've tried to use it, but it came through in this instance. Now that I've gotten used to it, I kinda like it
Now, if I can just figure out why EVERY attempt I've made at getting BootSplash working since I made the switch to the 2.6 kernel (like, a year+ ago) has failed, I'll be doing great. It's so much better than 2.4 in so many ways that I don't want to switch back... but damn do I miss bootsplash
I hope there are not abunch of newbies scratching their heads now over what they've done wrong.. :) .. And there should be a "table=/dev/hda" at the end of the "other" definition too, ..
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
My money's on GRUB! Go GRUB!
I loved the old terminals and Indies which had much more administrator functionality in ROM.
BIOS is basic, you set it up correctly once, turn off the messages and boot. And, apart from some quirks, almost never breaks down. If one of the terminals or Indies broke down, there was *big* trouble.
If the BIOS' architecture was good, then there would be no need for boot loaders: the BIOS would take care of loading the proper operating system. Each hard disk should have a dedicated space on them for describing O/Ses:
-sector start and size in sectors of the kernel loader
-name of the O/S
-parameters (types and values)
The actual parameters selected by the user would be passed to the kernel when the kernel's 'main' function was called.
Furthermore the BIOS should start in 32-bit flat mode.
We are in 2005, our graphic cards can do 25 million polygons per second, yet our BIOSes boot in 16-bits and can't manage modern disks...
It's not my problem. I have an AMD64 and a SATA HD and I use Grub. The problem happened in my friend's AMD.
Personally, I prefer LILO because I prefer the way it handles things. The config file is straight forward and most importantly, doing remote kernel upgrades is a lot less prone to failing with LILO's -R option.
/ Booting-once_002donly.html#Booting-once_002donly
I do note that GRUB has finally added a "boot once" option, as documented here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node
I think this is a good example of what could be improved in GRUB; having to set the next-boot-default by an index number in the config file rather than using the nice label. UI does matter.
People complain that one has to run 'lilo' after updating the kernel, etc, but they are missing the point of why that is good; lilo does all kinds of sanity checks. With GRUB, sure you get a menu for when you've goofed something in the config file, which you typically find out when on the next reboot. But that menu doesn't help much when the machine is 600 miles away without console access.
Guide a non-linux person over the phone through GRUB's menu? No thanks.
Anything is possible given time and money.
I wonder if there are any statistical studies to prove that exposure to MS software contributes to a higher frequency off off by 1 errors? My post seems to be a prime example. ;)
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Look at the name. And you're arguing that getting away from BIOS is possible with that?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Because complexity is the enemy of reliability, as Alan Robertson likes to say.
LILO is simple. Therefore, beginners find it frightening and cannot use it. They need the complexity of GRUB, because they are not knowledgeable enough to use the simpler tool. Pro carpenters don't need to lug around heavy, expensive, laser-guided miter saws that require a 120 VAC infrastructure, because they can cut a true angle with a simpler toolset. That makes it possible for them to do more things and for their methods to be more adaptable and more reliable.
Rewriting your BIOS, of course, is even better than LILO. But again, not for the n00bs.
GRUB has its place. That place is not in the hands of experienced professionals.
If you figure out who was being petty, think about letting me know... then think about whether or not I care.
Okay. You're being petty. I don't care whether or not you care.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re