Re: Will upgrade to XP kill lilo and mandrake??

[Andrew Clausen]

On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 11:18:38AM +1000, Dan Washusen wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-04-02 at 11:01, Wylie Edwards wrote:
> > If I upgrade to xp and it kills the
> > boot loader, how do I get it back?
> 
> I think XP would kill lilo.  But it's really easy to get it back...
>
> [6 step process omitted]

I find it really amusing/disturbing that such a common problem
has such a complicated solution.

IMHO, the RH/Mandrake/whatever install CD should have an option
(alongside "Install", "Upgrade" and friends?) to "reactivate"
a linux distro.

The main problem with this is, if there are multiple distro's
installed, you're not sure which grub or lilo configuration
to use.  So, it can't be made completely "luser-proof" :(
But, most lusers would only have 1 distro anyway...

Perhaps the best solution is to make grub/lilo add a timestamp
inside their config files when the bootloader is INSTALLED,
and the auto-reinstaller looks for the config file with the
newest timestamp?  (Obviously, this is different from the mtime...
we want the file that was USED for an installation last, not UPDATED
last)

Unfortunately, this seems to be against grub philosophy...
grub doesn't have a central config file for installing the
first (and a half ;) stage bootloaders... nor to say which
menulist, etc. it's using.  More fundamentally, the grub installer
might not even have a way of writing to the file system (and
therefore, no way to write timestamps).  It seems the only way
out of the mess is by grub telling some initscript (via linux
commandline?  grub=(blah)/boot/menu.lst), and the initscript can
do it's timestamp magic.

Ideas?

Andrew