oops,
that I didn't know.
GRUB 0.95 is exactly what came with my distribution (debian sarge),
and it took me quite a while to find out that the loader caused the trouble.
Whatever, lilo works just as fine ...

I've never understood why this is such a problem. Is there a real technical problem, or is it just that people don't like typing 'lilo'? I kind of like it because it provides a simple sanity check on my lilo.conf file.

Regards,
Jacob

You can uninstall 'lilo' from your mbr. I don't think you can do the same for 'grub'.
I used to like this feature when I wanted to go back to the Windows boot loader and completely remove Linux.

If you just type and at the Windoze (Recovery) Console it will also reinstall the ntloader, no matter what has been installed in the mbr.

Well, about 10 years ago when I was extensively compiling my kernel lilo broke my mbr. Nevertheless it was 10 years ago and lilo's version is much higher I still remember this incident. But I still use lilo, however I try not to rewrite mbr too often

Take care,
Mariusz

the problem is it will write to mbr everytime we type 'lilo', is it needed??
>it provides a simple sanity check on my lilo.conf file
yes.
it would have been nice, if it runs(checks) without writting to mbr.

but grub gives a minimal bash like environment, from there u can fix some...

i am using lilo i do like it, so my choice goes to lilo.

fdisk /mbr works wonders also

lilo - sucks
grub - sucks less

Grub gets my vote. command interface, network boot stuff, doesnt write the mbr with each change.... But then again I dont think it really matters and I certainly do not consider one "better" than the other.

Try lilo -t and man lilo

thanks "gbonvehi" i am still learning...
this one is good

actually my idea was, there must be some other script(let me call it as lilonew )which will update lilo without writting to mbr. but usual /sbin/lilo is still there to write lilo to the specific place, which we mentioned in lilo.conf

i think, if we use grub we only need to edit menu.lst, and grub will look on to that. so that we are not writing to mbr everytime

still i love lilo

Lilo must write to the mbr (or wherever you boot from) when you update the lilo.conf file because it must rewrite the boot sector with the new configuration data. Grub gets around this because it is able to read the configuration file on the disk.

I do not believe there is any true technical issue with writing to the mbr over and over. I think the issue is simply that if one messes up while editing lilo.conf, then the boot sector is messed up and your computer won't boot without a rescue disk. With grub, you just drop into the grub command line a fix whatever is wrong. I don't see much of a difference in this respect.

I think that the true advantage of grub is that it is much more flexible.

Jacob

Excepting that, something seriously wrong has to happen for overwriting the MBR to be a problem of merit. Like, seriously enough that Grub isn't likely to handle it well, either. IBM's verbiage is accurate, but not exactly representative of the reality of the situation. "doing something" is always going to be riskier than not doing it.

Also, only lilo is installed by default in Slackware. If you want grub, you need to install it yourself, either from source, download a *tgz, or install it from /testing

i think lilo can have problems booting anything past the first 1024 cylinders if there's a bios limitation. in the past i used lilo exclusively, but i recently installed an OS way past 1024 on an extended partition and lilo couldn't boot it, even though my hardware is fairly recent. maybe i implemented lilo wrong, but once i switched to grub, it worked fine. i'm now a grub convert. it's also really nice not to have to run lilo everytime you make a change. so:
1) on older hardware, or
2) if you expect to make frequent changes or kernel updates

i would recommend grub over lilo.

What is diff between find and locate?

The lilo 1024 cylinder boundary has been fixed for a long time.

I prefer grub for trivial reasons... I'm not fond of lilo's progress dots,
nor having to re-run it when initrd or the kernel changes.

Like I said, trivial, but to each his own.

One non-trivial advantage to grub that (knock on wood) I haven't had to use is the ability to use the prompt and enter any necessary parameters even in the face of a catastrophic boot failure.