[Techtalk] I lost my filesystem
Malcolm Tredinnick
malcolm at commsecure.com.au
Tue Apr 15 09:14:10 EST 2003
On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 09:26:55AM -0700, Carla Schroder wrote:
[...]
> An additional note here- l hear much moaning and groaning from
> oldtimers are are used to LILO, and don't want to mess with GRUB.
> That, of course, is your privilege. Still, I think anyone who gets the
> hang of GRUB will prefer it to LILO. It is far more flexible and
> powerful, and not bound by disk geometry like LILO. On true LBA
> (large-block addressing systems) GRUB can read any part of a hard
> drive, so you are not bound by the 1024-cylinder limit, so there is
> none of the creating-boot-partitions below the 1024-cylinder limit
> silliness, put them anywhere your heart desires. Even Windows can be
> fooled into booting like a real operating system.
In general, I prefer GRUB to LILO (having used both pretty extensively
and under some strange situations). However, to balance Carla's argument
(which I agree with), I should point out that one thing GRUB seems to
lack is a complete equivalent to LILO's -R option which allows you to
boot one particular label _only_ on the next boot and does not depend
upon whether the boot succeeds or fails. You can fudge around this with
serial line stuff, but that is not always convenient (think of a
headless machine in a rack with not much space around it).
I help manage some machines at work that we keep LILO on for just this
feature, since it provides a way to boot into new kernels and go back to
the old way just by hitting the power switch.
Apart from that item, I would recommend GRUB over LILO most of the time
(although I suspect GRUB is a little harder to learn from scratch).
Malcolm (looking forward to reading Carla's article).
--
How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hand...
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