[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I have an emergency boot disk -- a floppy on which lilo wrote an MBR.
It works fine. I use it to dual-boot a functinoal sarge and a severely
broken etch (well, actually the etch doesn't boot).
The etch installer's lilo won't run. I could try running the installer
again and telling it to try grub, but I'm afraid that that might change
something that the sarge-installed lilo uses when I boot from floppy.
If the etch installer's grub fails like its lilo, I'm kind of afrais
that I will have no way of booting at all.
-- hendrik
As far as I know, lilo and grub are mutually exclusive because both are
boot-loaders that use a disk's mbr to boot up operating systems. This
means that you probably can't use both at the same time or use the data
of one with the other. However, if you're having problems loading one
of your two os's with lilo, maybe trying grub out, like you say, might
be worthwhile.
As far as I know, no matter which boot-loader is installed on your
master boot record, a bootdisk overrides the boot-loader. In fact, even
if your mbr is "garbled", a bootdisk should boot your system as it
normally does without any problems. Thus changing your boot-loader
during your etch installation should not affect how your system boots
with your bootdisk.
If you change your boot-loader with the etch installer, however, that
*will* affect how your sarge boots up *without* a bootdisk. If the etch
installer does not recognize your sarge partition, it may not be
available for booting at all. I suspect, however, that your etch
installer should recognize your sarge partition and provide a grub entry
for you (It did this for my windows partition without a problem).
If I were you, as a precaution, I would save my mbr (using something
like 'dd if=/dev/hdX of=backup-mbr bs=512 count=1') and then try, as you
say, to have the installer use grub as your boot-loader. Even if
something should go wrong, you can use the installer cd to boot up in
rescue mode and restore your mbr as it was before leaving your
boot-loading as it was originally.
--
Sincerely
Jose Alburquerque
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