LinMagAU features an article on how to get multi-boot capabilities with GRUB and LILO.
Tutorial on LILO and GRUB
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I really like the look of GRUB. Very professional appearance. I’m running BootItNG at the moment, which is very powerful but looks like a Win 3.11 reject.
I find it interesting that I never see articles on bootloaders for other platforms. When I went to install linux on my mac, I struggled because there was little written about the bootloaders used.
I’m not sure why the author has Grub chainloading Lilo to boot Mandrake. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just use Grub for everything? And if you need to edit grub.conf while not running the OS that Grub is installed under, just mount the partition grub.conf is on, and edit it from wherever you are.
Anyway…I find Grub to be quite simple once you get the hang of its terminology/syntax. It’s definitely my boot loader of choice. And it makes multi-booting numerous operating systems quite easy.
Slightly off topic (but still on). Has anyone every tried GAG? It looks like an interesting bootloader. Fits on a disk. Looks like it works automagically (makes me a neverous).
Single floppies: i haven’t tried GAG, but did try Smartboot. It looked pretty crappy to be honest. But it is free. Still wouldn’t boot the slackware cdrom, which my machine won’t recognize cause it’s ISO linux.
On chain loading: chain loading another linux does make sense if you plan on changing OS at times. That way each linux has it’s own bootloader controlled by one master GRUB.
It’s not as heavily advertised, but GRUB can also chainload a floppy. This means you can disable the BIOS floppy boot option (which otherwise may surprise you when you leave a disk in) but still have the option to boot from a floppy when you actually want to.
It wouldn’t surprise me if GRUB can chainload CDs, or USB storage devices, or input an OS kernel image by waggling a joystick, but I haven’t tried any of those.
Your timing could not have been better, Eugenia, I am installing a multiboot system today!
Erik
The trick to dualbooting is to know the location of your kernel (usually called vmlinuz, around 1mb). It usually resides in the /boot directory. To dualboot, it’s not even necessary to install the bootloader in the root partition. For instance, I have Suse on /dev/hda3, I installed Slackware on /dev/hda5, here’s the line I added into grub:
title Slackware
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5
Similarly, I didn’t install FreeBSD in the root partition; the following line did the trick for me:
title FreeBSD
root (hd0,1,a)
kernel /boot/loader
Some distro’s find out automagically which OSes are installed on the disks and then either automagically add these to {GRUB|LILO} or ask the user about it.
Some don’t.
I’ve used LILO in the past and currently prefer GRUB. Why?
1) Never have or had to type ”lilo” after a new kernel has been installed. I forgot to do this so many times. (dunno if fixed).
2) Never have or had problems after booting up and reading MBR LI or LI*$@&*($% (weird symbols) or LILO or LIL- or something like this appeared and the box simply hangs. Granted, such can be fixed, however if the box is 300 miles away i don’t want as less possibility such problems can occur as possible. (dunno if fixed).
3) It’s KISS. I find it easy to edit an entry from the boot console as if using a text editor, but in the case of LILO i just don’t like the way it goes. It’s a bit different too, for example counting from 0 and not the ”GNU/Linux” way, though not *that* hard to understand imo especially not woth the good documents which exist. Having used SmartBoot for a while it’s not exactly KISS either.
4) And finally, who uses a LInux LOader to start up Windows?
The manpages ”man lilo” and ”man lilo.conf” have helped me in great extend to configure my LILO as i wanted (with colors i wanted, almost no timeout, box name in it, etc.). Same counts for GRUB.
More GRUB howto’s can be found using Google http://www.google.com/search?q=GRUB+Howto
(same regarding LILO)
Gentoo comes with a great BootLoader entry in it’s Handbook
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=9
Also usable in other Linux systems. It also shows info about non-x86 bootloaders.
Don’t you think the name-grabbing is getting old? Why waste your time or my time with it? What’s the point?
There is a GRUB for DOS at:
http://newdos.yginfo.net/grubdos.htm
GRUB for DOS v0.1.4 can even emulate a floppy diskette using a hard disk 1.44M img file. Very handy! Its README and ChangLog files show the usage.
Really, there is no reason at all to use a seperate boot loader for each distro. Mount where ever /boot is, edit the grub.conf and run grub. Not that hard, and certainly easier then using a boot loader like LILO that requires you to run it just because you updated the kernel. Grub is also nice, because if you misconfigured your Grub or don’t have an OS with grub installed, there isn’t anything you can’t do from its command line.
There are good reasons to use LILO, I’ve heard of people with old machines having trouble with Grub and not with LILO. But other then that, Grub is the way to go.
Though looking at the GAG page, it does look pretty neat. Not neat enough to invest the time to try installing it, perhaps in the future.
well, i’ve tried grub, and never got it to work right, i never got it to work with my wierd partition scheme, i’ve also used lilo for a long time now, and i find the syntax very easy and prefer it. i’ll be sticking with lilo
I remember being able to trick lilo into chainloading a diskette, but no matter how much I tried I was never succesful to do this with GRUB. I had no problem loading floppy-IMAGES from the harddrive though. Could you please tell me how to do it? And if you know, also how to do the same thing for CD-ROMs.
But every time I use PartitionMagic it destroys it. I used to use XOSL but it doesn’t seem to work with my newer PC. So at the moment I’m using Windows XP’s bootmenu which starts a LILO image.
Chainloading Flopy:
You need to configure your menu.lst (or grub.conf in RH) like this:
root (fd0)
chainloader +1
At grub prompt type
boot
after those. By the way, the GRUB Manual
http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub-0.92/html_mono/grub.html
is very well written and easy to follow.
Booting CD-ROM:
As far as I know, GRUB can not boot CD-ROM, the only devices it boots are (hd) and (fd). I am currently using Smart Boot Manager to boot hd’s, partitions, flopies, and CD-ROM’s.
Terminology:
Should we use “OS loader”(like GRUB and Lilo) and “Boot Manager” (like SBM) instead of “bootloader”?
1. Make a GRUB flopy or have your Linux live CD around, in case things are screwed up. It sounds like a generic warning but what I want to say is that it is easy to run into troubles with GRUB, even though it seems fairly easy to configure. One reason is the following.
2. Use consistent files when installing GRUB. When you install GRUB, you need first to copy some files (stage1, stage2, stage1_5’s) into /boot/grub in a partition. Then you have to specify this partition with “root” and run (assuming you are installing GRUB to the MBR of the first HD)
grub> setup (hd0)
from an installed GRUB (either on a flopy or from a Linux installation). At this moment make sure to use a GRUB that installed with the same set of files. Otherwise it might not work and leave you with an unbootable HD. Both RH 9.0 and SuSE 8.2 shiped with GRUB 0.93, but they are not the same! I copied GRUB files from RH 9.0 and then installed GRUB from a flopy made in SuSE 8.2, and it simply didn’t work.
3. If you had a separate boot partition for an installed distro and tried to install GRUB from that distro, you would have boot trouble afterwards. It is caused by devoce list/mount point confusion.
4. I would suggest creation of a small, dedicate partition for GRUB itself, install it in the MBR, and then install other OS loaders (GRUB, lilo, NTloader,…) into their own partitions. The master GRUB can be configured to chainload all of them, and you would have the flexibility to reinstall any of them without affecting the main boot procedure.
GRUB is great and fun. Enjoy it!
I do some hobby OS developing and find grub to be a God send! I turn off floppy boot in the BIOS and boot Grub off a small fat16 partition. It dual boot that partition as DOS and a micro dist of Linux. The boot menu also allows floppy, Various partitions, and tftp! So most of the time I turn on (or hit reset) a menu pops up and I choose to load a new menu from tftp. This menu is created by ‘make’ and has the latest revs of my OS listed and ready to go.
In this example. GRUB can boot his Mandrake partition directly. Just pass it the root partition and kernel args the same was as for the SuSE partition.