Lilo to Grub

Michael Paoli Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu
Mon, 23 Aug 2004 21:12:41 -0700


Quoting simonst@wellsfargo.com:

> I need to convert my laptop (Knoppix hdinstall) to boot from Grub instead
> of
> Lilo.  Does anyone have suggestions or warnings about such a conversion?
> It's required because Lilo is (apparently) not supported for dual-booting
> Windows running our harddrive-encryption software.

I'd think it should be relatively straight-forward.  GRUB has a lot of  
capabilities and features and a lot of documentation, ... but it is well
documented and the documentation is relatively straight-forward.  I've
actually got my personal laptop setup as dual boot.  I've got NT
bootloader (which IBM may do some "pre-desktop" hard drive stuff before
it effectively chains the NT bootloader) ... from there I default to the
NT bootloader "booting" GRUB, and GRUB defaulting to booting Debian
GNU/Linux.

General recommendation: proceed reasonably carefully and have something
else (e.g. KNOPPIX CD) you can boot from if something "goes wrong".  I
think you'll find once you've completed conversion from LILO to GRUB and
gotten used to it a bit, you'll likely find you like GRUB much better
than LILO.  Some of the key things I really like about GRUB over LILO
are its more intelligent handling of filesystems (so GRUB "knows" how
to read and load a file, whereas LILO has to be rerun if the blocks are
so much as relocated), and its nice editing capabilities (so one can
inspect/edit a boot command, or run other GRUB commands that one may not
have already configured into one's menu of choices under GRUB).