On Monday 27 October 2003 23:07, Charles Curley wrote:
Is there any way to detect which boot loader is the working one? Simply detecting whether a grub or lilo package is installed may not be sufficient, especially in the case where both are installed. I suppose I could look to see which is more recent, grub.conf or lilo.conf, but I can think of several scenarios unde which this would fail.
It's time to update my bare metal recovery scripts (http://www.charlescurley.com/Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWT O.html) to handle grub, and I'd like to detect the current boot loader if possible.
Would this method be of any use? Use "dd" to read the MBR, assuming that's where your boot loader resides. I know that the word "GRUB" will appear; for example:
#dd ibs=512 count=1 if=/dev/hda | grep -i grub Binary file (standard input) matches
Someone else will have to pipe up about LILO though...
Regards, Mike Klinke