[ale] GRUB issue on boot

[Michael B. Trausch]

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James Sumners wrote On 04/13/2006 09:39 AM:
> Install lilo. I don't know why distributions are moving to Grub. I
> have never seen an installation of it that doesn't screw up at some
> point. I recently added a kernel switch to the Grub config on my SuSE
> 10.0 box and it caused my machine to reboot every time Grub started to
> load. I reinstalled Grub several times and the same thing kept
> happening. Surprise, surprise, I installed lilo, with a basic config,
> and I could boot my machine again.
> 

That is interesting -- I've been using GRUB for quite some time now, and
I've never experienced a problem with it unless a drive was dying or
dead.  It's more flexible and versatile, because it doesn't rely on a
block-list for a new kernel, and you can edit the command line options,
and everything about the boot process, before the system even boots.
You don't even need to reinstall GRUB when you edit the boot script,
which is one of the strong points behind it.  Also, the GRUB is great
for when you have several operating systems that you need to boot
between, and any of them are Multiboot systems.  I've experimented in
the past with creating OS kernels that the GRUB can boot (writing a
32-bit protected mode version of "Hello, World" with a small multiboot
kernel and such, never really got that much further then that, though I
wanted to).

> Just grab a copy of SysRecueCd (http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page),
> boot from it, mount your root partition, and chroot to it. Then you
> can try to re-install Grub or install a boot manager that is more
> stable (doesn't suck).
> 

With LILO, the most you can do is change the command line that the
kernel receives, IIRC.  You don't have the flexibility of changing
things like what initrd is loaded if you're testing new things or
anything similar to that.  I would try to find out the root cause,
rather then bailing out so quickly.  If there is a problem with the GRUB
booting up, I'd be inclined to say that it means that stage 1.5 isn't
loading.  (I'm not sure, but I think the Stage 1.5 is loaded from a
block list since the initial boot sector only has 512 bytes to play
with, and it's rather hard to write something that can read and
interpret a filesystem in that small of a space when you have other
considerations to make during system boot).

	- Mike
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