LILO vs. GRUB

Posted Jun 17, 2004 2:03 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872)
Parent article: LILO vs. GRUB

We switched from LILO to GRUB because LILO is too dumb for its own good. Sometimes when moving hard drives from one machine to another, we'd find that LILO would no longer boot (it would get as far as "LI" or sometimes just "L"). It most often happened when Ghosting images onto new machines.

Because LILO locates the data it requires (in particular, your kernel) through a static list of sectors and offsets, any changes in the drive geometry, even switching CHS translation techniques, can cause LILO to break and necessitate a boot from a rescue disk. Most of our systems are in custom industrial enclosures with no removable media drives, so booting from a rescue disk isn't always easy.

GRUB, on the other hand, actually understands drive geometry and even knows how to read your filesystems. We've yet to have GRUB die on a drive/image transfer. On rare occasions when the MBR gets fragged, booting GRUB over the network and re-running the GRUB installer will fix the problem in much less time than booting all the way into Linux to re-run LILO.

So, personal preference aside, GRUB has saved us a lot of time that we previously wasted trying to coax LILO onto new systems.