Kosh
07-31-2002, 10:29 PM
I've been using lilo as my bootloader for about 2 years now for all of my systems. Yesterday for some reason I ended up installing grub on one of my computers accidentally.
At first I had no idea what to do, I learned that it could understand file systems so I was able to find my linux kernel in /boot/vmlinuz. I ran the following:
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2
boot
which got somewhere but ended up in a kernel panic instead of the login prompt.
I was very close to dismissing grub as pure junk when I did some checking. I loaded my installation from the bootable cdrom and discovered that the Slackware iso does not even contain grub. I finally realized that it was either my fault or the fault of the previous distribution (rh7.3 I believe), which must have left grub on there.
So instead of going back to lilo I decided to grab the code for grub and install it. What I have learned since then is that grub can understand filesystems, so it can look for files on a linux partition. So if you screwed up your kernel, but have a backup copy you can just configure it from the grub command line and boot that way.
I've been pretty impressed with the simplicity and power of this bootloader. Although lilo does it's job quite well I find that having a tool like grub is much more useful. What do you guys think?
At first I had no idea what to do, I learned that it could understand file systems so I was able to find my linux kernel in /boot/vmlinuz. I ran the following:
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2
boot
which got somewhere but ended up in a kernel panic instead of the login prompt.
I was very close to dismissing grub as pure junk when I did some checking. I loaded my installation from the bootable cdrom and discovered that the Slackware iso does not even contain grub. I finally realized that it was either my fault or the fault of the previous distribution (rh7.3 I believe), which must have left grub on there.
So instead of going back to lilo I decided to grab the code for grub and install it. What I have learned since then is that grub can understand filesystems, so it can look for files on a linux partition. So if you screwed up your kernel, but have a backup copy you can just configure it from the grub command line and boot that way.
I've been pretty impressed with the simplicity and power of this bootloader. Although lilo does it's job quite well I find that having a tool like grub is much more useful. What do you guys think?