grub configuration tool

[Rich Edelman]

On Thursday 20 June 2002 10:23 am, Brian Densmore wrote:
> Umm... not exactly. The HDD specification is a little different
Yeah, just a bit. :) It is I believe hd(0,1) to select the first partition of 
the first hard drive found (usually the ide0 master). Similarly hd(0,2) will 
select the second partition and hd(1,0) will select the 2nd hard drive found 
(which could be the slave drive on the first ide channel, or the master drive 
of the second ide channel). hd(0,0) selects the entire first disk. And the 
man pages are fairly complete.

> >The biggest difference between the
> > two (from my perspective) is grub knows how to read the filesystem on
> > the HDD (so you change the config files and it just works), while lilo
> > needs to store references to the file's absolute sectors, so
> > you have to
> > "re-run" lilo after making any change.
>
> That is the biggest plus.
IMO, the biggest plus is being able to edit the boot line at startup. Let's 
say you install a new kernel, but typo it's name in the grub config. At boot, 
just arrow to the image and press 'e' to bring up the boot commands for that 
image. Select the line that you want to change, press 'e' again, make your 
changes, then press 'b' to boot. No more rescue disks for a bad kernel 
install. :)

> title=Linux 2.4.19 - Densmore Build
> root (hd0,0)
> kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda5 hdd=ide-scsi

Quick note: if your root filesystem is journaled, you might want to boot with 
the 'rw' kernel option, as log replay on a read-only drive is a bad thing. :) 
Mandrake up to 8.2 doesn't add the 'rw' flag to the lilo/grub config when 
appropriate, and I suspect RH doesn't do it either, but please correct me if 
I'm wrong.

Rich