Boot Loader Detection: GRUB or LILO?

[Erik Williamson]

Watchout on this one - I've got a machine here which has had both 
bootloaders installed, and both GRUB and LILO show up in the MBR - but 
if you pipe it through strings - like Leonid said - it looks like you 
will see only see 'lbaLILO' on the machine where it's active.  Here's 
what works for me:

#!/bin/bash
dd ibs=512 count=1 if=/dev/hda 2>&1 | strings | \
	grep GRUB 2>&1 > /dev/null
isgrub=$?
if [ $isgrub -eq 0 ] ; then
     echo "Grub"
else
     dd ibs=512 count=1 if=/dev/hda 2>&1 | strings | \
	grep lbaLILO 2>&1 > /dev/null
     islilo=$?
     if [ $islilo -eq 0 ] ; then
	echo "Lilo"
     else
	echo "Unknown"
     fi
fi



Michael Kearey wrote:
> Aaron Konstam wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 04:07:15PM -0700, 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-HOWTO.html) 
>>>
>>> to handle grub, and I'd like to detect the current boot loader if
>>> possible.
>>
>>
>> The solutions suggested seem too complicated. Just reboot. Unless things
>> have changed radically the lilo boot screen looks completely different
>> that the grub boot screen.
> 
> 
> The original post very obviously needs a way to detect Grub and Lilo 
> programmatically.
> 
> The solutions suggested are appropriate. Maybe you need to read the 
> original post carefully.
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael
> 
> 
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-- 
e r i k   w i l l i a m s o n                     erik at cpsc.ucalgary.ca
  system admin . department of computer science . university of calgary