Quoting "Bryan J. Smith" <thebs413@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Nothing more and nothing less. Most users will never use
>> any of grub features other than selecting which image to
> boot
>> (same as in lilo).
>
> Umm, GRUB does _dynamic_ boot resolution. LILO does _not_,
> it says "blindly boot this sector offset." That's why you
> have to re-install LILO everytime you change something.
>
> That's the _key_ difference between the two.
>
> Hence why GRUB is highly recommended over LILO, because you
> can resolve issues at boot-time -- including helping users
> over the phone without their having to have a rescue disk.
> GRUB is adding more and more disk label and filesystem
> support all-the-time.
Incidentally, the *only* time ever that I needed those extra features of Grub
was a case where LILO would have simply worked ;-)
Or at least warned me about the problem right away right there pointing to the
real underlying problem with very clear message.
What happened was that I had a laptop whose BIOS could address only
around 8GB. So I made sure that Windows partition was almost 8GB with
partition for /boot
filled the rest of the disk up to 8GB mark. Well, the thing was the
BIOS could
really address a little bit less than 8GB (heads*sectors*1024 was really just
under 8GB), so the part of my /boot partition ended up above BIOS limit. It
happened that kernel and initrd ended up in addressable space. Grub's
configuration file grub.conf ended up in non-addressable space, so Grub
couldn't read it during boot, and it would throw me to command line with some
non-intuitive error message (took me some time to figure out what was really
the problem). Obviously, if I had LILO on that machine, it would just
work. Of course, it might have failed on kernel updates (if new kernel
or initrd
ended up in non-addressable space, which would happen sooner or later).
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