FC4t2 no good without LILO

Mike Bird mgb-fedora at yosemite.net
Thu Apr 14 20:37:58 UTC 2005


On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 13:12, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> One last try.

[Great test log showing grub-install writing to both MBR's on SCSI
drives when boot loader portion of MBR's was first zeroed and when no
partition on either SCSI was marked active.  Thank you for that datum.]

So what did you mean by "The characters 'LILO' still left
behind (as a remnant) after doing the grub-install has no bearing
whatsoever on whether or not grub was really installed."?  The letters
are part of LILO's first stage boot loader and are not part of Grub's.

Here Grub doesn't write to either MBR:

# grub-install --recheck /dev/md0
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script `grub-install'.

(fd0)   /dev/fd0
(hd0)   /dev/hde
(hd1)   /dev/hdg
# od -c /dev/hde | head -1
0000000   ë   H 220   l   b   a   L   I   L   O 001  \0 025 004   Z  \0
# od -c /dev/hdg | head -1
0000000   ë   H 220   l   b   a   L   I   L   O 001  \0 025 004   Z  \0
#

(I get the same result with or without --recheck).

Maybe Grub only overwrites the MBR if it's zero.  Maybe Grub only
overwrites the MBR when no partition is marked active.  Maybe Grub is
broken on IDE, or on tertiary IDE.  If Redhat would document what
functionality is supposed to be working, we'd know what sort of bug
report to file, if any.

Clearly, Grub still isn't reliably doing the job of Lilo, which is where
this all started.

--Mike Bird




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