Boot Loader Detection: GRUB or LILO?

Charles Curley charlescurley at charlescurley.com
Tue Oct 28 18:06:56 UTC 2003


I've had an interruption in my email service and don't have individual
email responses here to which to reply. Fortunately, I can read the
archive and will try to respond here.

Mike Klinke <lsomike futzin com>
> 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

It will tell you if grub has been used, not necessarily if it is the
current boot loader. I tried that on my test system and found both the
keywords LILO and GRUB in its MBR (they are in two different places in
the MBR). I have not yet tried re-running lilo on that system to see
if lilo will clobber the GRUB keyword. But I know that grub does not
clobber the LILO keyword.


"Doncho N. Gunchev" <mr700 globalnet bg>
> ... and... maybe, this can be solved for fedora by simply putting an
> /etc/bootloader.conf with a single line bootloader="whatever"
> ;)... just an idea ;)

That would solve it for Fedora, but won't help non-fedora users. Also,
what if the user switches to a different boot loader? The new boot
loader would have to know to over-write bootloader.conf.



Arrgggh. Nothing's perfect; I guess I'm going to have to muck with
it. I'll probably have to warn the readers and suggest they hard code
which one (if any) to use.

-- 

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