On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 16:48 -0600, Russell L. Harris wrote: > * hendrik@topoi.pooq.com <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com> [061207 14:13]: > > I have an emergency boot disk -- a floppy on which lilo wrote an MBR. > > It works fine. I use it to dual-boot a functional sarge and a severely > > broken etch (well, actually the etch doesn't boot). > > > > The etch installer's lilo won't run. > > This is curious, because the Etch installer installs GRUB, not LILO. > LILO is deprecated, if not obsolete. Even the Sarge installer > installed GRUB by default. LILO is not deprecated, though I have used only GRUB for about 4 years now (on most systems). Other platform versions of LILO boot other machine architectures (SILO for Sparc comes to mind). In case you don't know it, LILO is the default boot-loader if you use XFS for your booting partition. XFS and grub still do not get along all that well. > > I could try running the installer again and telling it to try grub, > > but I'm afraid that that might change something that the > > sarge-installed lilo uses when I boot from floppy. > > I don't think that is a possibility, but even if it were, there should > be no problem, because GRUB is very comprehensive and should find all > the operating systems on your machine and automatically configure > itself for booting all of them. It still fails to find many older OSes. Its all in the implmentaiton of the distro. Heck, just recently the grub-installation routine for the etch installer missed my 80GB ATA100 disk with Windows XP on it because I replaced the splash image on it, which to be honest is a trivial thing to do. (read as there are cheap and free programs to make it happen). > > If the etch installer's grub fails like its lilo, I'm kind of afraid > > that I will have no way of booting at all. > > I advise you to trust GRUB and forget LILO. I to advise GRUB, but to forget LILO and howto use it... is treading on dangerously thin ice there. -- greg, greg@gregfolkert.net The technology that is Stronger, better, faster: Linux
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part