Re: lilo about to be dropped?

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>]

Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Giacomo Catenazzi, le Wed 08 Apr 2009 19:47:55 +0200, a écrit :
> > Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > > > I installed grub (and Debian). Trying the Windows hidden partition
> > > > (to install windows), grub stopped working (it was rescue mode, but
> > > > without capability to rescue something). Also rescue disk +
> > > > reconfiguring + update-grub did nothing.
> > > Err, did you re-run install-grub?
> > No ;-) only update-grub and
> > dpkg-reconfigure -plow grub-pc grub-common
>
> Then little wonder. update-grub only updates menu.lst.
>
> > I was expecting that reconfigure will do the right things,
>
> grub maintainers considered that it's a bad thing to automatically
> reinstall things in a MBR.  You need to re-run grub-install to do that.

but MBR was fine, i.e. I had the grub rescue prompt.
But no way to boot from rescue prompt.
I know to few about grub...

So I wonder what was overwriten. Does grub use the unallocated disk
space near the MBR? This is very bad: I think in future we will
use also this space. The cylinder notation in partition table
has no more physical meaning, so also the partition boundary could change
(but there was a discussion about poor performance if partitions/filesystem
was not aligned to the "physical" block sectors.)

ciao
	cate