Grub? Alternative to Lilo?

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Grub? Alternative to Lilo?
started by: AgustinCórdoba

Posted by AgustinCórdoba on Sep. 09 2004,09:37

Hi,
I've been playing around with DSL for a week or so, running it from the CD-Rom, as well as a test install on one of my W98 hard drives. On my main machine I'm already running two different versions of Debian, as well as XP Pro, and using GRUB to select system on start-up
When I installed it on the W98 hd (probably hda2) Lilo was offered as default, and seems to work OK, but I'm happier with GRUB. If, on the next install, I instruct it NOT to put in LILO will I be able to access it by editing my existing grub?
Of course, with multiple hds and the TX/133 card I can edit BIOS startup and have it start from SCSI, but that rather defeats the point of having a bootloader.
One more question: When I installed the Linux system that put GRUB on my machine it never triggered the virus-warning feature enabled in BIOS, but LILO did... Any suggestions?

MTIA

Agustin

Posted by cr on Sep. 11 2004,22:53

No reason why you can't use GRUB - GRUB will try to boot anything so long as you tell it where it is.

I just put DSL 0.5 in a spare partition in my Linux box and booted it fine from GRUB - the GRUB entry was:

title DSL on /hdc8
root (hd1,7)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc8 hdb=ide-scsi

NOTE that since I had DSL tucked away down the end of the third hard drve, I had to tell GRUB where to find it - (hd1,7) is GRUB drive terminology
Your drive addresses will be different

And then in the 'kernel' line I had to pass its location (in Linux terminology i.e. /dev/hdc8 ) to the DSL Linux kernel so it won't get a 'kernel panic' when it starts

The 'hdb=ide-scsi' is my CD-ROM drive and is just an entry I copied from other Linux distro entries, not sure if it's applicable to DSL

Posted by Agustin on Sep. 14 2004,14:03

Thanks for that. I'll pay around with Grub a bit.

I have 1 80 Gb hard drive with NTFS (hda1), another 80Gb with FAT32 and Linux etx3 (hdb1 and hdb2). Also I have a promise TX 133 card with two hard drives connected (pri master 20 Gb and secondary slave 4.3 Gb); the 20 Gb is partitioned 9.3 Gb for unstable Linux deb, and the rest in 7 partitions for Debian Sarge (new install). The other drive is FAT32 only.
Depending whether in BIOS startup first device is C: or SCSI different Grubs will appear, in the first case to multi-boot XP-Pro (hda1) and Guadalinex (hdb2). If first device is SCSI then I multiboot my new Guadalinex (hdh1) , my Debian Sarge (root hdh2), and Win 98 (hde1).
As you can see, there are plenty of locations where I can put dsl, but I have to be careful not to trash anything resizing partitions!

Thanks again,

Agustin