dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 9:56 UTC (Thu) by grmd (guest, #4391)
In reply to: LILO vs. GRUB by Klavs
Parent article: LILO vs. GRUB

The -R command line option is also very useful when you have a dual boot system, for quick shutdown from one system (e.g. Linux) to reboot into another (e.g. Windows) without the timed out delay waiting for the user to select which system to boot.

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dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 10:30 UTC (Thu) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (2 responses)

There's a patch out there somewhere that allows to do this with grub. From the changelog of the Fedora Core 2 rpm:

"- add patch from GRUB mailing list from Keir Fraser to add a --once flag to
savedefault function so that you can have the equivalent of lilo -R
functionality (use 'savedefault --default=N --once' from the grub shell)"

dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 14:32 UTC (Thu) by plars (guest, #7736) [Link] (1 responses)

That's great to hear that someone is actually thinking about doing this... but a patch out there doesn't help me. Until that patch is in mainline grub code and present in all major distros, grub is completely useless to me.

I do a lot of automated testing, sometimes on machines that take a long time to boot. Without the -R (or equivilent option) all of my time would be used by standing around waiting on a LOT of individual machines to get to a boot loader prompt so that I could select the right kernel. Not all of us boot a kernel expecting or hoping for it to work. :)

dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 15:33 UTC (Thu) by nstraz (guest, #1592) [Link]

I do a lot of automated testing too and I find that LILO is better in that environment. Being able to add another kernel image easily to the config file and setting LILO to boot it is invaluable. As far as I've seen, doing that with GRUB is tricky. If I could specify the default kernel to boot by name instead of by number, I'd probably start using GRUB.