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Grub not always so good


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I've built countless Gentoo installations, and always used grub for the boot loader. Never had any problems until now. Grub just completely wouldn't work. Booting the system gave:

 

Error 1

 

which according to searching says I don't have enough memory to use it. First I thought maybe it was the splashimage. Nope, disabled that. Then thought maybe it's the framebuffer settings. Nope not that either.

 

Emerged lilo, and just.....worked.

 

So, guess grub isn't all that good either. A bit like lilo sometimes, although lilo has always worked for me, whereas grub is lacking behind on one install :)

 

Incidently, it was a PIII 550 with 400MB of RAM and 10GB HDD, but this should have been far adequate for it to work.

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hmm...I fail to see how one error means that grub is somehow worse than lilo :unsure:

 

I imagine lilo could break just as easily.

 

I have exacly the same problem with grub...never could get it to work.

Since Mandriva 2007 spring change the bootloader to grub it just stop booting in this strange hardware configuration....urpmi lilo and puffff....work like a charm.

 

Mandriva was the only OS linux based that i experiment that booting was no problem until they replaced lilo by grub and i tried,Fedora which none of the versions from 3 to 6 was able to boot properly,suse from 10 it doesnt even could get it installed it hangs while loading installer,Debian based,well forget it i even tried Slackware which it installs but hangs at boot....so Mandriva was the only distro that worked just right out of the box with lilo.... :wall:

 

This is a not so new AD77 Infinity board from DFI based on VIA KT400 with a scsi adaptec 19160 controler with a 18 GB SCSI HDD and 2 HDDs 120GB ATA on the raid controler plus a 120 GB ATA HDD as a primary master.Not very pretty this config but Mandriva really works fine in here.

 

Cheers.

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There used to be a bug in grub related to ram. IIRC grub must have certain specific memory registers open in ram in order to work. If something else gloms onto those registers, grub will not load and you will get an error 1 message. This frequently was a problem with onboard graphics adapters that used some of the ram for graphics memory. The bios would frequently assign the registers needed by grub to the graphics adapter. I thought that bug was fixed but perhaps not. Lilo is not so fussy and will load into ram wherever there is space available.

 

waredevil, check out my post here re my adventure with grub:

 

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...518&hl=grub

 

I feel your pain.

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Yep,same pain tho.

I guess we must "ditch" grub for now.

I feel more confortable with lilo cause i have been using it since i start messing around with linux,Mandrake 8.0 was my first sucessfull linux install.

Not so familiar with grub but what i understand from what i have been reading about,is that grub is more flexible in some things than lilo....but hey....one thing i have learned using micro$hit products....if it works dont change it!!!!

Grub is still young and almost every distro is using it so,in a near future it could become much better and bug free(if such thing is possible). :D

 

Cheers....

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All you geek types really have a problem don't you. :lol2: :lol2: :lol2:

 

I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag yet I have been able to use grub without difficulty for over 4 years on 5 different hardware rebuilds of my computer, plus 3 rebuilds at least on each of two different friends computers plus 4 other peoples computers. But you guys can't handle it ???. :D :D :D

 

Come on now you must be joking, pulling our legs.

 

Cheers. John.

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Come on now you must be joking, pulling our legs.

An example,have you installed grub in a machine with 2 Hdds on a Highpoint 378 on board raid controller and with a SCSI HDD over an adaptec 19160 controller?

If you didnt then you should and you will get an idea of what kind of trouble we are talking about....

For the record,i have been able to install pclinuxOS 2007 in a usb HDD with grub and it boots fine...the aside is that it wasnt installed on this computer,it doesnt even boot in here but boots fine im my lappy. :wall:

I am not saying that grub sucks....just it has a few glitches that need to be solved on some not very usual hardware configs....For most standard configs i dont doubt it works fine.

 

Cheers....

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Funny you should mention that wardevil. The machine I've just installed on has a highpoint controller!

 

Looks like I started a flamewar with grub vs lilo here :lol2:

 

I'm not dissing grub or lilo. A lot of people use grub and never have any problems and say why do people use lilo? Seen many a post here on this from regular members here. Lilo has worked everytime for me. I'm experienced enough to know that hardware can play a part as to whether lilo/grub will work or not.

 

I started using grub because everyone was saying how superior grub was, etc, etc, etc. I started to like it because of the splashscreens and being able to edit the file without reloading the boot sector like you have to do with lilo. You can edit the boot line when you start the machine, making testing parameters easy.

 

Perhaps grub is better for newer hardware, and perhaps lilo is much better for older hardware. Or even specific hardware old or new, you have to use one or the other based on your experience/problems.

 

I'm still using both, and I believe both grub and lilo have a place in this world. If there was only grub, I'd have a BIG problem trying to boot my machine. Thank god we have a choice in this world to ensure a resolution to my problem.

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Come on now you must be joking, pulling our legs.

You're obviously lucky with hardware and don't have anything that causes issue with grub. I use grub and gentoo. Gentoo you install and build everything manually, so I know I can handle grub easily. I'd say easily without problem, but hardware is out of my or even anyones control.

 

As I said in my first post, I've never had problems with grub until now. The Error 1 it seems is a bug (from pmpatricks post) or cannot allocate memory where lilo doesn't care. 400MB on a system should be plenty enough to work fine, and an Error 1 that I searched says not enough memory. Somehow my machine doesn't fit that scenario.

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hmm...I fail to see how one error means that grub is somehow worse than lilo :unsure:

 

I imagine lilo could break just as easily.

 

As I said in my post, that grub breaks sometimes just like lilo. Grub, like lilo has it's own niggles, and therefore isn't the big thing everyone makes it out to be. Everyone says grub is so superior, which yes for some of the features it is. But it seems to have a bug that requires specific memory addresses, instead of just using whatever memory it needs without being so specific. That affects it's so-called superiority a little methinks.

 

Anyway, I use both, as I've continually said here. It's a bit like the gnome versus kde thing. Some hate gnome, some hate kde. I use both, like I do with grub/lilo.

 

People should be able to realise the benefits of both options, than be narrow-minded, because I realise the benefits between using gnome versus kde, or in this case, grub versus lilo - instead of pushing myself down one path without considering the use or benefits of another boot loader or desktop environment or whatever else.

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I use grub on my Debian laptop mainly because it was the default and it's fine. But I use lilo for everything else mainly because I started with lilo and it's really easy for me to understand and use. And writing lilo.conf for Gentoo is ridiculously simple. Unfortunately though for some reason Mandriva doesn't like me using lilo in Gentoo. It fails to boot completely. So I have to add Gentoo to Mandriva's lilo and then boot into Mandriva every time I build a new kernel in Gentoo. It's sort of a pain. Oh well!

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grub v lilo's also a bit of a religious flamewar. I've used both successfully for extended periods of time, and most errors or criticism for either that I see, were caused by the user, not the bootloader.

 

in reality, both suck in different ways because of their design.

 

Once GRUB2 is released, I think we'll see a lot of these issues solved. GRUB2 is a redesign, and shares nothing with it's previous version.

 

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-2.en.html

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I discovered that Grub sometimes gets mixed up in a mixed environment with both ide and sata/scsi devices. When I installed Fedora on my laptop, it would not boot because it wanted to call my hard drive boot partition sda2 instead of hda2. It did the same on my brother's machine, with Mandirva rather than Fedora, but an edit of Grub fixed the problem. (On my brothers, it tried to boot hdb1, where the drive was on sda1.) In both cases the fix was to check that the file named the correct devices. So it is a good policy to look at the file, whether lilo or grub, before completing the install.

 

I have used both lilo and Grub with 4 or more operating systems. I have also experienced problems with both.

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