[Nottingham] Which Bootloader?

[Martin]

Jon Masters wrote:
> Johannes Kling wrote:
> 
> |   Is there a generic way to check which bootloader a machine is using
> | if both LILO and GRUB are installed and configured
> 
> Short answer is no.
> 
[...]
> 
> | rebooting? I tried "dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 | strings" with some
> | success on some systems
> 
> I think LILO tends to shove the string LILO near the start of the bsect.
> This is not an ideal way of doing it but for example hexedit shows:
> 
> 00000000   FA EB 20 01  B5 01 4C 49  4C 4F 16 05  E3 DD E1 3F  ..
> ...LILO.....?
> 
> On my desktop but nothing intelligable for a grub based loader (which is
> a sane thing for an official GNU bootloader to do, oh yes).
> 
> It all sucks ...

Yep... It is all rather depressingly familiar with all the 
non-interested lax 'idiots' that wander around only half doing whatever 
jobs... Makes for a good challenge for those that are truly motivated to 
get a proper intelligent thoughtful job done of whatever!

Hope Johannes enjoys the Sherlock Holmes sleuthing to find out what the 
previous admins have or haven't done... (:-))


To keep things together, good comments from the wrong thread:

peter.chang at nottingham.ac.uk wrote:
 >
 > Someone was asking about the difference between GRUB and LILO. Well,
 > check out
 > http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/MBR_in_detail.htm
 >
 > Watch out for MBRs that started life as LILO and got switched to GRUB
 >  (say, by upgrading a Red Hat distribution).
 >
 > For instance, dumping my MBR
 >
 > # dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.dat bs=512 count=1
 > # od -tx1z mbr.dat 0000000 eb 48 90 6c 62 61 4c 49 4c 4f 01 00 15 04
 > 5a 00
 >
 >> .H.lbaLILO....Z.<
 >
 > [snipped]
 >
 > 0000160 41 bb aa 55 cd 13 5a 52 72 49 81 fb 55 aa 75 43
 >> A..U..ZRrI..U.uC<
 >
 > [snipped]
 >
 > 0000560 7d e8 2a 00 eb fe 47 52 55 42 20 00 47 65 6f 6d
 >> }.*...GRUB .Geom<
 >
 > 0000600 00 48 61 72 64 20 44 69 73 6b 00 52 65 61 64 00
 >> .Hard Disk.Read.<
 >
 > 0000620 20 45 72 72 6f 72 00 bb 01 00 b4 0e cd 10 ac 3c
 >> Error.........<<
 >
 >
 > which as you can see holds both ASCII signatures.
 >
 > Peter


Cheers,
Martin

-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
----------------


-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
----------------