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Re: Debian Rescue Floppy




On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Jerome R. Acks wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 09:24:28AM -0500, Roberto Sanchez wrote:
> 
> > Not to trigger a flamefest or anything, but why on earth are people
> > still using LILO? 

because under certain mb, certain version of lilo and grub,
one will work when the other doesn't

if you know all your grub and lilo options for its config file,
both will work 

excludig specific versions of either grub or lilo or silo or loadlin
or foo-bar-whacky-new-stuff:

grub has a chicken and egg problem in that it needs to read
boot info off the scsi disk which it can't until it has the scsi
driver loaded from the scsi disk ( stage1_5 fs stuff )
that lilo doesn't need ( stage1_5 fs stuff ) and hides behind the scene

>  This is not the dark ages anymore.  GRUB is much
> > easier to use,

depends if you can remember the grub.conf file commands 
and/or the manual install command  and what all those itty-bitty
numbers mean in the grub.conf file which is DIFFERENT than
the menu.lst file

but once grub is loaded, grub is easier to add new kernels
whereas lilo can !@#$%^ things up after adding a new kernel

grub has a failover mode, if you like to be able to boot the 
other kernel if the default failed, but how many peple use those
nice features on their remote colo machine when you upgrade
your kernel and wanna test it, but afraid of them pesky kernel panics
or wrong nic drivers ...

>  and if you set it up to use symlinks (similar to LILO)
> > you never have to reinstall it to the MBR when you change kernels
> > (since it can just read for filesystem to get the new kernel).
> 
> I do that on my older computer. On my newer one I use LILO because
> GRUB will only boot the PC if I boot from a floppy.

something is wrong ...

grub will boot off floppy or any other boot media
lilo will boot off floppy or any other boot media

> If I install grub
> on any of the hard drives, the boot always hangs.

something is wrong with your grub.conf or menu.lst or both

> I get a black screen
> with the word "GRUB" followed by three non-alphabetic characters.

you have a corrupt mbr or corrupt stage1_xxx that corresponds
to your /boot partition  or more fun corrupted files someplace

-- resintall grub and double check the proper syntax of
   grub.conf and menu.lst

-- why some distro/people merge grub.conf and menu.lst is 
   a whacky idea .. different info is needed in each

c ya
alvin




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